
ass B^Rno2. 

Book t p 8 



Copyright N°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



V 



4 b 



PILGRIMS 

In the Region of Faith 



AMIEL TOLSTOY 
PATER NEWMAN 



A Thesis with Illustrations 

by 

JOHN A. HUTTON, M. A. 

AUTHOR OF "GUIDANCE FROM 
ROBERT BROWNING IN MATTERS OF FAITH " 




CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



t)H 



:\1 



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7* 



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LIBRARY <i( CONGRESS | 
Two Copies Received 

SEP 26 1906 

_ Copyright Entry 

&H-, is; fC iob 

CLASS ^ XXc, No. 

/T799S 

7 COPY B. \ 



COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY 
JENNINGS AND GRAHAM. 



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MY MOTHER 



PILGRIMS 

In the Region of Faith 



Preface 

It was one of the happy surmises of sim- 
pler days — a surmise which received much 
support in well-tested facts — that, by the 
benign appointment of God, wherever poi- 
sonous plants were to be found ready to 
deceive the unwary, or creeping things 
with poison in their tongues, there also 
were to be found the very herbs and balms 
which would grapple with the element of 
death in them ; that the soil which bore the 
bane, nourished the antidote. 



I am quite sure that it is true wisdom 
and the one effective method to answer an 

7 



Preface 

age out of its own mouth. God hath not 
left Himself without witness, and least of 
all in the century which has just closed, the 
century on whose spiritual products we 
are living. 

One proof that an Invincible Mind is 
dealing with us for our well-being is that 
every powerful mood which invades or 
infects an age has already a touch of its 
own opposite : that what is all the fashion 
is already nigh unto perishing: that reac- 
tions, relentings, protests do arise out of 
the unplumbed depths of the soul of man. 

We are strangers and pilgrims on the 
earth. As often as we forget that this is 
our predestined lot — source at once of our 
grandeur and gloom, and think to settle 
down upon some solving word as though 
it were final — and this either on the right 
hand (as did Newman), or on the left (as 
do many) — forthwith things begin to gather 
within us and about us which make us un- 
happy or afraid, and we rise again, because 
we must, and strike our tents and pursue 

8 



Preface 

our further way. It is one mark of the 
people of God that, like Abraham and Isaac 
and the children of promise, they " dwell in 
tabernacles," in temporary habitations of the 
Spirit, in places wherein to rest for a time, 
wherein to lose the immediate strain, 
wherein to await the call of God to the next 
stage and venture of the Spirit. 

* * * * 

The substance of what is here given on 
"Newman" appeared in the first issue of 
The Union Magazine. In what I have 
written on that great and good man I de- 
tect a tone of controversy which I should 
have avoided if I had known how to write 
differently and yet to be quite faithful 
to myself. F. D. Maurice characterised 
the Tractarian atmosphere as that of a 
"charmed dungeon." I acknowledge the 
"charm" — few days of my life pass with- 
out some contact with Newman ; but I see 
the "dungeon," and have written as I have 
written. Newman is one of those with 



Preface 

whom one must agree or disagree with a 
certain violence. 

He's sweetest friend, or hardest foe 

Best angel or worst devil ; 
I either hate or — love him so, 

I can't be merely civil. 

j. A. H. 

Jksmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 
April, 1906. 



IO 



Contents 

CHAP. PAGE 

THESIS 13 

I. Henri Frederic Amiel in "Journal 

Intime," ----- 23 
II. Walter Pater in "Marius the 

Epicurean," - - - - 63 

III. Leo Tolstoy in ' ' My Confession, ' ' etc. hi 

IV. John Henry Newman in "Apologia 

pro Vita Sua" - - - 159 



Thesis 



" Inexplicable, in a sense, as man's personal agency is — nay, 
the one perpetual miracle — it is nevertheless our surest datum, 
and our clue to the mystery of existence." 

*' It is the pressure of the answer that puts the question." 

14 



Thesis 

Pierre Loti, in the "Iceland Fisher- 
man," describes a storm in the Arctic seas 
which caught a Breton fishing-boat. The 
hero of the book — the man with whom he 
is dealing — was at the wheel, and Loti sets 
forth the agitations of his soul, as, rising 
from the depths in him, they came one alter 
another into his face. At the outset, when 
the storm seemed to be but one of many, 
an emergency for which ordinary prudence 
and daring would serve, the man at the 
wheel showed no alarm — jested even, and 
that roughly, with his fellows, like youth 
rejoicing in that element of contradiction in 
which it hails its task. 

As the storm thickened and revealed 
itself as no ordinary affair, the man held 
his peace, except in moments when strange 
and senseless oaths escaped him. 

J 5 



Thesis 

As the terror of the deep began to settle 
upon him, his face became fixed and un- 
natural, like the face of a poor, trapped 
beast. 

As the night gathered round, bringing 
no abatement of the elements, giving to 
every horror another turn of the screw, as 
the toiling boat, burdened with water, no 
longer rode upon the waves, but sagged 
and struggled in the troughs, like one who 
knows that the day is lost, the man, now 
frozen to the wheel, began wildly and with- 
out consciousness to recite his prayers. 

At the last, when all indeed was lost, 
when, so to say, there was no further use 
for a man's ordinary faculties, that face, 
white, hard, tense before, seemed at one 
definite moment to kindle and soften as 
though the bitterness of death was past. 
In place of the terror of the deep, there 
seemed to have come the spirit of a great 
contentment; instead of conflict and curs- 
ing and despair, the holy light of some 
difficult but accomplished reconciliation. 

16 



Thesis 

And with the ancient human cry upon his 
lips — wherein surely we are not deceived, 
else all is vain — " Lord, have mercy upon 
me," " Lord, receive my spirit," Jan went 
down into the depths. 

"Thy way is in the sea, and Thy paths 
in the great waters !" 

Differing greatly in tradition, in tem- 
perament, in training, as do these four 
Pilgrims who are considered in the follow- 
ing pages, they arrived at the point which 
constituted the crisis for each of them by 
the force of what were essentially the same 
principles. 

In every case pure reason had brought 
them, or was threatening to bring them, to 
a standstill ; and they began to resume an 
energetic and harmonious life, only after 
they had taken what, for each of them at 
that moment, was a leap in the dark. This 
leap they took, not because it was the evi- 
dent way of truth for them — of that they 
could not speak — but because it was the 
one way of life. They had arrived at a 

17 



/ 



Thesis 

lonely point in their thinking, where, as it 
seemed to them, two alternatives were 
alone intellectually possible — the interpre- 
tation of things which implied God, and the 
interpretation which, however men might 
cover the bleakness of it with words, in- 
volved the denial of God. Of these two 
alternatives which seemed intellectually 
competent, one only, the interpretation of 
faith, was possible on the moral plane. 
From the other they simply shuddered. 
Now in these deep matters, wherein a man 
is dealing with himself in an irrevocable 
way, a shudder is an argument. 

They were saved when they saw clearly, 
so clearly that the insight had something 
of the constraint of a word spoken to them 
by the Author of their being, that there is 
something in man more primitive than 
reason, and at the last more authoritative, 
viz., the instinct to live, and when they 
permitted that elementary force, the force 
of life itself to carry them round the diffi- 
cult dead-centre. One might, indeed, pur- 

18 



Thesis 

sue the analogy of the dead-centre and the 
fly-wheel, discovering many a quite fair 
and fruitful parallel. Particularly this: it 
was no more intended that we should live 
without the momentum of feeling and de- 
sire and faith, without the inertia of a long 
established and actual world, than that an 
engine which was built to run with a fly- 
wheel, and has hitherto run with a fly- 
wheel, should continue to run after the 
fly-wheel had been detached. 

As for Ami el, he did not take that leap 
in the dark which for him also was the 
strait gate unto life. He would not permit 
life to have its generous way with him. 
He withstood the daring of his own soul. 
That is the pathos of his story, as he him- 
self was aware. He knew that it was just 
that which was awanting in him, which 
was essential to every man who would be 
himself. 

We live by faith ; and the event of our 
time in the region of pure thought is that 
men are now to be found who are not 

19 



Thesis 

ashamed to say so, and to defend the life 
of faith as the only conceivable and rational 
way. 

It may be true that no intellectual justi- 
fication of a quite coercive and overwhelm- 
ing force, no justification in terms of reason 
in the narrow sense, can be given for the 
very things by which we live. But we are 
acting in a becoming and necessary way 
when we behave handsomely along the line 
of such evidence as we have, though we go 
beyond the evidence itself. In short, we 
do well to believe in the line of our elemen- 
tary needs. Certainly, in the dizzy mo- 
ments when only two ways lie before us, 
and the next step must have something in 
it which shall be irrevocable, it is incum- 
bent upon a rational being to take that 
step which leads unto life. 

So long as we are here in this world 
there will always be a gap between the 
things of faith and the things of sight ; but 
it would help a great many people to come 
to peace with themselves, and to settle 

20 



Thesis 

down to some good purpose in this life, if 
it could be brought home to them once for 
all that that gap in the evidence will not be 
filled up in the experience of any one, 
until he puts himself into it. 

In the building of the bridge across the 
Forth, and near to its completion, a day 
arrived when the two great arms of the 
central span approached one another, until 
they almost met over the abyss. A space 
however still remained ; though even at 
that stage it was apparent that the bridge 
was intended to be one, — all the labor from 
the north side to find its complement and 
justification in all the labor from the south 
side. That narrow gulf was not spanned, 
the ideal was not fulfilled, the thing did not 
become what all the time it was seeking to 
be, until into the blank interval the work- 
men built the platform on which at the very 
moment they were standing — the platform 
which had supported them from the begin- 
ning, the platform on which they had done 
all their work from its foundations in the sea ! 

21 



Thesis 

Between faith and sight, between the 
seen and the unseen, between the evidence 
for anything which is purely good and the 
corroboration, there will always be an un- 
bridged space, a cleft, a halting on the one 
side and on the other, everything indeed 
recommending that the breach be closed 
in order that we may proceed as men with 
our real business in the world. But nothing 
will serve to bring the two together except 
that a man put himself into the breach. 
Once more, we live by faith ; what God 
hath joined together, let not man put 
asunder. 



22 



Henri Frederic A mi el 



"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and 
your belief will help to create the fact. The scientific proof that 
we are right may not be clear before the day of judgment is 
reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings 
that then and there represent them, may then turn to the faint- 
hearted who here decline to go on, with words like those with 
which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory 
had been gained : « Go and hang yourself, brave Crillon, we 
fought at Arques and you were not there.' " 

"What makes a man is the sense that he has committed 
himself." 

24 



Henri Frederic A mi el 

In Dante's "Inferno" the way to Hell 
proper lies through the Stygian Mere. In 
the city of Dis, which forms the vestibule 
to Hell proper, just within its gates, the 
souls of those who in this life denied the 
essential things of faith, endure eternally 
the fruits of their choice. The point is 
that, according to this infallible wizard of 
the soul, who never uses an idle word, 
doubt or denial of God is a condition which 
men come to as the result of the misman- 
agement of their own hearts, as the result 
in one way or another of some private 
moral failure. In that dreary Stygian 
marsh, which in Dante's scheme leads to 
the abode of the doubters, the souls of the 
sullen lie buried in the clammy ooze. 
These are they who in this present life 
were guilty of the sin of sadness. They 

2 5 



Henri Frideric Amiel 

permitted a certain gloom to hang like lazy 
smoke about their hearts. They invited 
the sense of discouragement to stay with 
them. They lingered upon their own pri- 
vate reasons for being sad, and thus dur- 
ing their lifetime dwelt in an atmosphere 
of lament and dimness. They would not 
stir up their souls to take hold on God. 
They would not permit the fresh air of the 
morning, the glorious light of the sun, to 
have its generous way with them, to lead 
them out into manly and cheerful acts. 
They would not assert themselves and claim 
God against the thraldom of the disabling 
gloom. Therefore Dante convicts them of 
sloth. Beyond these, in that Inferno of 
his, which is simply the subterranean cham- 
bers of the soul thrown upon a screen, 
Dante, I repeat, places the doubters, the 
deniers, next to the slothful, on the side 
farther from the light, nearer to the utter- 
most state of darkness. In his view, that 
is to say once again, doubt or denial may 
creep upon the human soul and harden 

26 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

over it like a crust, not so much in conse- 
quence of this or that particular incident 
in the man's intellectual life, but as a last 
result of his permitting the disheartening 
things of human experience to weigh un- 
duly upon him, to dwell habitually with 
him. According to Dante one may sink 
into an invincible attitude of doubt or de- 
nial, by simply encouraging within one- 
self the sad or dismal view of things, by 
refusing to entertain the evidence on the 
other side, giving it equal weight : nothing 
worse than that. But there is not any- 
thing which could be worse for beings 
such as we are, who have been sent into 
the world, not to hesitate about things, but 
to live our life once for all, with all our 
strength. 

When all is said, there you have Amiel's 
story, with something of injustice indeed, 
the injustice which we always perpetrate 
when we try to find in the warm and 
various life of any man the mere illustra- 
tion of a principle. But on his own con- 

27 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

fession, repeated again and again, that was 
AmieFs malady, his sin, in Dante's bolder 
phrase. 

Henri Fred6ric Amiel was born at 
Geneva in September, 182 1. He belonged 
to one of the families who had fled to 
Geneva after the Revocation of the Edict 
of Nantes. He inherited therefore the 
Protestant and Calvinistic strain. In our 
day, when we have accepted, it may be, 
even too solemnly, the doctrine of heredity, 
the circumstance that Amiel came of such a 
stock is not to be neglected. It explains 
something in him which otherwise it would 
be hard to account for. Whatever charges 
may be brought against Calvinism, one 
thing can never be denied to it — it brought 
men and left them face to face with God. 
But in bringing a man face to face with 
God you emphasize and define his own 
personality, so that henceforth he sees him- 
self alone, with a certain majesty of be- 
haviour as proper to him and incumbent 
upon him. Whosoever has been born of 

28 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

that line will never be able, in spite of the 
moral confusion which enlightenment may 
introduce into his later life, to rid himself 
of the idea that in the universe he stands 
alone, distinct to himself and to God, re- 
sponsible and free. Amiel was never able, 
at heart he was not disposed, to lose en- 
tirely this sense of the reality of the human 
personality. He was a Hegelian with a 
difference. He never found solace in any 
philosophical view which threatened to ex- 
tinguish the individual in the play of mighty 
and universal forces. He would speak of 
sin, and saw no prospect of better things 
for the world except by the moral regener- 
ation of individuals. 

Amiel was left an orphan at the age of 
twelve, and this circumstance doubtless 
helped to confirm that habit of solitariness 
which became at once the source of his 
greatness, and, when all is said, of his 
failure. There were few events in his life. 
He was known with any degree of inti- 
macy only to a small circle of friends. Those 

29 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

friends, knowing the range and depth of 
Amiel' s culture, were always in expecta- 
tion that one day he would give to the world 
some really great work. But as the years 
passed and no great work was forthcoming, 
they became impatient, and, it would 
appear, did not hide from their friend that 
they considered him wanting in energy. 
He was always industrious, exacting of him- 
self, and yet so far as results showed all to 
little purpose. 

"We could not understand," says 
Scherer, "how it was a man so richly gifted 
produced nothing, or only trivialities.' ' 

At the age of twenty-one Amiel went 
to Germany for purposes of study. He 
remained there seven years. They were, 
by his own statement, the happiest of his 
life. At that time Germany seemed to 
have a monopoly of the world's first-rate 
minds, quite indisputably of the world's 
first-rate thinkers. Looking upon those 
days from this distance of time, what an 
outbreak of the soul, of the spiritual, it 

30 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

was! What boldness, what imagination, 
thought losing itself in poetry, reason hov- 
ering on the edge of dreams ! This atmos- 
phere penetrated Amiel, for he was by 
temperament predestined to it. On return- 
ing to Geneva he was appointed to the 
Chair of ^Esthetics at the University, and 
five years later became Professor of Moral 
Philosophy. Once again he failed to realize 
the anticipations of those who knew his 
gifts. The fact was that Geneva, in those 
days of political stir and change, was no 
place for a man of Amiel' s brooding dis- 
position. He stood aloof from the enter- 
prises that were on foot, and incurred the 
penalty — he was left alone. Yet all the 
while Amiel' s was a nature which craved 
society, and needed the support of those 
who believed in him. But he was also one 
of those to whom friends must come, for he 
could not seek them. It is most likely that 
the people with whom he came into con- 
tact considered him a close person, who, it 
might be, secretly despised them all, who 

3i 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

in any case was sufficient for himself; 
whereas, as we come to learn, he hungered 
for encouragement, for friends, for the 
presence of those who could understand 
him. He was at no time a strong man 
physically. Indeed, it puts us at the 
proper point of view for estimating Amiel, 
to remember at every stage that he was 
something of an invalid. His wisdom is 
the wisdom of those who are ailing. His 
wonderful outbursts of serenity and recon- 
ciliation with himself are the touching and 
pathetic recoveries of one who is never for 
one moment otherwise than fundamentally 
ill He died in April, 1881. 

We have passed thus hurriedly over the 
outward facts of Amiel' s life for the reason 
that for our pupose those which we have 
alluded to are the salient ones. Further, 
Amiel' s real history is the record of his 
opinions, his feelings and musings, his 
hopes, his misgivings, his haunting sense 
of defeat. "Let the living live," he wrote 
while he was still young, anticipating the 

32 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

event, "let the living live, and you gather 
together your thoughts, leave behind you 
a legacy of feelings and ideas ; you will be 
most useful so." 

It often happens that only when a man 
has died, and from the manner of his death, 
do we get that knowledge of him which 
enables us to do him justice. We blame 
a man for violence of temper, it may be, 
— and, when all is known, he may be to 
blame. But he comes to die. We learn 
the cause of his death — some affection of 
the heart — and immediately we see our old 
friend almost justified. Or we blame a 
man, and this brings us nearer to Amiel, for 
not doing work which we think he might 
do. We become impatient of him and 
pronounce him timid or lazy : but we learn 
at last, and when we can no longer ask his 
forgiveness, that he was so constituted, so 
limited by some malady which lay always 
in the background, ready to take advantage 
of him, that, on the whole, he did what he 
could. 

3 33 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

The story is told of a Scottish professor 
who called up a student to read and con- 
strue. " Hold your book in the other 
hand," said the professor. The student 
went on reading, apparently paying no 
heed. " Do you hear me, sir?" The stu- 
dent ceased reading, still holding the book 
as before. " Sir ! " shouted the professor. 
Whereupon the student raised his other 
arm — from which the hand had been cutoff! 
It is said that the professor rushed from his 
desk and, kneeling before the student, 
pleaded, "Will you ever be able to forgive 
me r 

Amiel died, having given nothing to 
the world in any way worthy of his peculiar 
powers, but he left behind him a work, 
which at once was the worthy labour of a 
lifetime, and at the same time goes far to 
justify his long delay. Amiel is so exclu- 
sively known by the "Journal" which he 
left behind him, which was published a year 
after his death, that when we use his name 
we mean his book. When we say Amiel 

34 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

we mean his " Journal," just as when we 
say Bunyan we mean the " Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress," and when we say Augustine we 
mean the " Confessions." 

When the " Journal" appeared, that 
happened which takes place when a new 
constellation floats into our sky. Those 
who are always on the lookout for any 
sincere treatment of life, hailed the new 
star, and communicated the discovery to 
one another and to the world ; and soon it 
became common knowledge, amongst those 
at least for whom such souls as Amiel's 
signify, that a new light had taken up its 
abiding place in the firmament of confes- 
sional literature. Timid as Amiel was, he 
seems to have been confident that an 
honourable place would be found for his 
"Journal;" that it would find its way to 
certain hearts as all sincere words do. 

It would be a pleasure to me to dwell 
upon some of the extraordinary beauties 
of Amiel's "Journal," its tenderness, its 
sorrow, and again, its knowledge, its critical 

35 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

value, its guidance in matters of art, of 
taste ; its insight into those systems of 
thought which have influenced men and 
are still influencing us for good or evil ; its 
wonderful power to detect and name the 
weakness which vitiates such systems. I 
should have liked, too, to dwell on its 
value as a mirror of the soul of man at 
this particular stage of time, of its value in 
helping us out with many an inarticulate 
trouble of our own ; to repeat some of its 
so chaste and memorable sayings, prayers, 
cries. All this I must deny myself, and 
proceed, as I do now, to deal with him as 
a pilgrim in the things of faith. 

The prevailing note in Amiel is one of 
sadness, depression, despair. We have 
here a man who knows everything, who 
can see the world with the eyes of every- 
body, who yet, and it may be in conse- 
quence, can do nothing with all his heart 
and with all his strength. From one point 
of view there is nothing different in his 
spiritual career from what is essential in 

36 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

the case of every typical man of the nine- 
teenth century — from Goethe to Tolstoy. 
Here once more we have the story of a 
man equipped, presumably at the outset 
of his life, with that natural faith, so to call 
it, that light which lighteth every man who 
cometh into the world, which is the endow- 
ment of birth, or the gift of God, as you 
choose to define it. In his case we must 
allow indeed that this native zest for life 
was never very heroic or robust. But it 
was there, and in a certain dim way it 
survived even to the end. We see this 
man also encountering the spirit of inquiry, 
of criticism, tasting of the tree of knowl- 
edge. We see the inner ferment which 
that contact produces, the increasing sense 
of a contradiction within him, between his 
original faith and the world of fact and 
experience. We have seen, or we shall see, 
concerning certain typical men of his cen- 
tury, how in one way or another, that 
primitive faith emerged from the conflict, 
on the whole victorious, though not the 

37 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

same, and bearing many a mark. We 
have seen, or shall see, them one and all, 
letting go the faith by which they lived, 
only to take a deeper or a higher hold of 
it again. To change the metaphor, we see 
these typical men swept off their feet for a 
time, but at length learning to swim, learn- 
ing to be at home and to be themselves in 
the perilous element, or, in the case of 
Newman, getting on to a vessel which 
happened to be moored near by. In Amiel 
the story does not move on to a crisis, and 
never attains to the deliverance and solid 
advance which come with a crisis. He 
broods, and broods, and dies brooding. 
He has not the courage either to deny or 
to believe ; he will not commit himself in any 
final way to faith or denial. He is too good 
a man to do without God: yet he knows 
too much, he thinks, to believe without mis- 
giving in any defined apprehension of God. 
Now can we account for this difference 
in the spiritual history of Amiel from what 
we find to be characteristic of other pil- 

38 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

grims of his century, who, on the whole, 
felt the same challenge to faith from the 
side of the world ? I think we can ; and it 
leads us directly to what I believe is the 
root of this whole matter. 

In one of his earliest pieces of writing — 
a review from his hand when he was twenty- 
one years of age — Amiel already betrays 
a certain moral disposition, which he him- 
self does not hesitate to call cowardice. 
He is writing about the Renaissance, about 
that immense wave of thought, of imagina- 
tion, of all kinds of liberty and fruitfulness 
which swept over Europe in the Middle 
Ages. Everything that Amiel says about 
the results of that movement is quite true : 
the significant thing, the sad thing, is that 
at twenty-one he should have said it. At 
twenty-one, by the decree of God, we 
should all be omniscient, ready for any- 
thing hard and strange. It is true that the 
Renaissance unsettled the old sanctions 
for life, introduced disturbing and qualify- 
ing ideas, and that in the transition and 

39 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

anarchy which followed certain beautiful 
and established things were unseated and 
destroyed. But at twenty-one a man's 
eyes should rather be upon the compensa- 
tions and advantages that come with 
change. He should — to confine ourselves 
for the moment to this matter of the Re- 
naissance — have eyes only for the wealth 
in literature and art which that shaking 
revolution brought into being; for the 
pictures, for the poems, for the new stir 
and joy of life, lor the new sense that the 
world was vaster than men had dreamed; 
for the spirit of prophecy, that there were 
Americas to be discovered, Americas be- 
yond seas indeed, but Americas also, un- 
traversed continents at home, and in the 
heart of man. An able youth of twenty-one 
should have had eyes only for such things. 
Now, as a matter of fact, how did Amiel 
write? "The Renaissance perhaps robbed 
us of more than it gave us." Quite true: 
and if that were all or were exceptional, 
it would only mean a wonderful maturity 

40 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

of mind in one so young. It would mean, 
too, that Amiel was so true to his Calvin- 
istic and Puritan strain, that in his view 
anything was had too dearly, which even 
for a day imperilled the holiness and 
chastity of the soul. But he continues: 
" There remains the question whether the 
greatest problems which have ever been 
guessed on earth had not better have re- 
mained buried in the brain which had found 
the key to them, and whether the deepest 
thinkers — those whose hand has been bold- 
est in drawing aside the veil, and their eye 
keenest in fathoming the mystery beyond 
it — had not better, like the prophet of Ilion, 
have kept for Heaven, and Heaven only, 
secrets and mysteries which human tongue 
can not truly express nor human intelli- 
gence conceive." You have there an utter- 
ance which has parallels in Newman ; and 
the root idea of it is a certain cowardice, a 
certain want of faith in the human enter- 
prise, really a want of faith in God, who 
has laid down the conditions of life and of 

4i 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

knowledge. What he says is virtually this : 
That since the instinct to inquire, to learn, 
to put questions, leads to changes and dis- 
locations, which may bring trouble and 
moral peril to individuals or to a particular 
generation, it would be better if men were 
>to stop thinking — if they were to that ex- 
tent to mutilate themselves, so that we 
might all have peace. Now, a man with 
Newman's temperament could say that, 
and, having adopted it as a final principle, 
could find refuge in it, as he did. But 
Amiel was a child of the Reformed Church 
so far that he had the incurable instinct to 
think out his way. That made the tragedy 
of his life. He could not but think out his 
way; he could never have accepted life 
with the condition that at a certain stage 
sincere thought should be discredited ; and 
yet at the same time he was paralysed by 
an idea which mocked him, that there was 
no finality, no permanent worth or comfort 
in mere thinking. 

You come to a view of Amiel, not es- 
42 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

sentially different from this, if you consider 
for a moment a defect in his character, 
which he himself dwells on frequently and 
always with regret. He could not bring 
himself to act. He would never commit 
himself. He would never let himself go, 
and thus test the foundations of the world. 
He might, as he himself saw clearly, have 
saved himself from despair ; he might have 
opened a way within himself for a new tide 
of energy and joy, if he had only declared 
that he was in love and had married ; or 
if he had compelled himself even to so 
little as the regular publication of literary 
work. But he shrank from the definite, 
from the completed, from the concrete ; 
and his " Journal" is the record, first and 
last, of the retribution which overtakes all 
such abstinence from life. "I have too 
much imagination, conscience, and pene- 
tration," he writes, "and not enough char- 
acter." That is the root of his malady. It 
is what Dante meant by sloth, by the sin 
of sadness, which is the approach to the 

43 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

state of complete denial. "To love, to 
dream, to feel, to learn, to understand — 
all these are possible to me, if only I may 
be dispensed from willing." If only I may 
be dispensed from willing — there you have 
the key to Amiel. "Practical life makes 
me afraid; and yet at the same time it 
attracts me; I have need of it. Family 
life, especially in all its delightfulness, in all 
its moral depth, appeals to me almost like 
a duty. Sometimes I can not escape from 
the ideal of it. A companion of my life, 
of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes ; 
within, a common worship ; to the world 
outside, kindness and beneficence ; educa- 
tions to undertake, the thousand and one 
moral relations which develop round the 
first — all these ideas intoxicate me some- 
times. But I put them aside, because every 
hope is as it were an egg from whence a 
serpent may issue instead of a dove ; be- 
cause every joy missed is a stab ; because 
every seed confided to destiny contains an 
ear of grief which the future may develop." 

44 



Henri Frederic Aniiel 

" I am distrustful of myself and of hap- 
piness because I know myself. The ideal 
poisons for me all imperfect possessions." 

"To be dependent is to me terrible; 
but to depend upon what is irreparable, 
arbitrary, and unforeseen, and above all to 
be so dependent by my own thoughts and 
through my own errors — to give up liberty 
and hope, to slay sleep and happiness — 
this would be Hell !" 

"All that is necessary, providential, in 
short, unimputable, I could bear, I think, 
with some strength of mind. But re- 
sponsibility mortally envenoms grief ; and 
as an act is essentially voluntary, therefore 
I act as little as possible." 

All the while he saw quite clearly to 
what end this attitude of his would lead. 
" He who is silent is forgotten ; he who 
abstains is taken at his word ; he who does 
not advance falls back; he who stops is 
overwhelmed, distanced, crushed ; he who 
ceases to grow greater becomes smaller ; 
he who leaves off gives up ; the stationary 

45 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

condition is the beginning of the end — it 
is the terrible symptom which precedes 
death. To live is to achieve a perpetual 
triumph ; it is to assert oneself against 
destruction, against sickness, against the an- 
nulling and dispersion of one's physical and 
moral being ; it is to will without ceasing, 
or rather to refresh one's will day by day." 
And now let us ask ourselves whether, 
things being as they are, a man like Amiel 
who proposes, so to speak, to take up 
with life upon certain conditions, condi- 
tions which the common sense and expe- 
rience of man hold to be a vain imagina- 
tion — whether such a man, proposing such 
conditions, is ever likely to arrive at a 
solid happiness in this world, or to be able 
to see his way clearly in the region of 
ultimate truths. Amiel refuses — I should 
like to qualify the phrase and bring it more 
into harmony with the delicacy and ten- 
derness of his attitude, but the word is 
not unfair — Amiel refuses to take part in 
life, and this on the ground that every act 

4 6 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

which a man commits, commits him and 
gives, as it were, a hostage to the future. 
Therefore he will abstain. He admits that 
generous impulses urge him at times to 
do something decisive, something which 
indeed will to that extent limit his life, but 
at the same time will express and define 
his life, giving it a kind of objective real- 
ity. But he pulls himself up on the 
threshold of action. Now there is simply 
no doubt at all that those who take up 
such an attitude, cut themselves off from 
certain fountains of insight and joy, and 
deprive themselves of those corrobora- 
tions which have always formed an essen- 
tial part, it may be even the basis, of the 
total wisdom of mankind. You can not 
see things until you are there. We know 
that all the knowledge which we come to 
have, the whole life of our mind and heart 
is provoked, is solicited out of the depths by 
the demands which life presents. A child 
in performing a task does something more ; 
he discovers, he creates his mind, he adds 

47 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

to and defines his own personality. Well, 
we might pursue that line quite legiti- 
mately until we arrived at this : that the 
greater the responsibilities we undertake 
and discharge, the fuller and wiser will be 
our knowledge of ourselves and of the 
world. But, not to dwell upon that, it is 
certain that there is a spiritual reaction 
which is really the glow of moral health, 
following upon and flowing from every 
deed in which we really commit ourselves, 
and this becomes in turn a kind of evi- 
dence that we are on the true way. In 
other words, the mere spectators in this 
world see nothing of the game. You 
must be in it before you can say how it 
feels. A man who simply ponders his 
duty has all the yoke of life without the 
anointing ; whereas there is something like 
the whisper of a "Well done" at every 
step whereby a man seeks to discharge 
his evident duty and calling as a man. 
The Greeks had a myth enshrining some 
such truth as this. Antaeus, in order to 

4 8 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

maintain his power of soaring in the air, 
must needs at intervals descend and touch 
the earth with his foot. The moral deeds 
of life, the deeds in which a man commits 
and engages himself, are just those points 
of the earth which the heavenly being in 
man, the pure spirit must touch, in order 
that he may soar again. To shrink from 
life, from actual moral performances, as 
Amiel did, is to put oneself out of connec- 
tion with certain compensations, lights, 
whispers, which are themselves like wind 
to the heavenly flame. Tolstoy had this 
very matter in view when he laid down 
five conditions which a man must satisfy 
before he has any right to look for peace 
of mind, before he can expect also to have 
a sane and healthy outlook upon life, and 
towards the future. One of these condi- 
tions is that he must not break the link 
between himself and the world of nature 
— what Jean Paul meant, in part, when he 
said that every day should close with a 
look at the stars. A second condition is 

4 49 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

that a man must work, actually labor with 
his hands, so that he may have a zest for his 
food, may sleep soundly and awake with 
happiness. The third — and I go no fur- 
ther — is family life, the very duties, claims, 
responsibilities, delights, which Amiel him- 
self sees and desires and turns away from. 
Since these are among the conditions on 
which God intends our life to be lived, it 
may well be that no man has the right to 
speak about life, about what he needs and 
about what is given, until he fulfills those 
conditions in fact, or realizes them by the 
force of his imagination. 

In Amiel, to look at this matter from 
another standpoint, we have an example 
of a man who sees so many things at once, 
who is so many-poised, that he can not 
bring himself to act decisively on any 
plain issue in life. His instinct, which, of 
course, would have urged him to act was 
balanced in his case by a sleepless, critical 
faculty — the Mephistopheles of Faust — 
which persuaded him that there were always 

SO 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

reasons on the other side for not acting, 
or for acting differently. In him instinct 
and knowledge cancelled one another, so 
that he simply stood still. As he became 
aware that this was his condition, as every 
failure to act confirmed his habit of not 
acting, his moral hesitancy became morbid 
and fixed. He is a Hamlet of these latter 
days, one in whom "the native hue of 
resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast 
of thought." Amiel is a classical instance 
of the man in whom culture or knowledge 
has weakened certain elementary powers, 
faiths, instincts, in the absence of which, 
nevertheless, a man ceases to be himself. 
He will not commit himself in any particu- 
lar case — he sees so much on the other 
side and on all sides. He will not apply 
himself to one thing — there are in this 
world so many things. Now, if in any urg- 
ent matter, either of duty or of faith, a man 
refuses to act, to make a personal choice, 
simply because there are so many facts 
and circumstances in the world, which, 

5 1 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

if he only knew them all, might lead him 
to act differently, or refrain from acting- 
altogether, that man is going against the 
ordinary practice of life in every region. 
If he were to adopt such a principle con- 
sistently, he would do nothing at all, in- 
deed he would become a maniac. For 
example, at this particular moment of time, 
everything so to speak, is happening 
everywhere. Outside the stars are shin- 
ing, the wind is blowing, ships are sailing 
the seas, tigers are devouring their prey, 
men are drowning, starving, women are 
weeping, houses are burning to the ground ; 
there are prisons, there are hospitals, there 
are asylums ; in operating theatres limbs 
are being amputated, obscure diseases are 
being probed — all these things, myriads of 
things, whole continents of things, are hap- 
pening everywhere at this moment; and 
yet for you, properly speaking, there is 
but one thing : you are reading this page. 
You know that in order at this moment to 
do anything, in order to be yourself in the 

52 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

particular circumstances of the moment, 
you must if need be, put out of your mind 
all such vagrant and incoherent facts as I 
have mentioned. They are all of them 
facts, interesting, serious, critical, and upon 
occasion it may be your duty to meet 
them ; but you know that it would not be 
sane upon your part to refuse such ideas 
as are presented in this page, simply be- 
cause the whole world, in its multitudinous 
details is living its life at the same mo- 
ment. Well, the same is to be said of 
every definite situation in which we are 
called upon to act. We must practice a 
certain restraint upon vagrant and unre- 
lated circumstances. We must select the 
facts which are essential ; and both intel- 
lectual and moral saneness consists in 
knowing what facts are relevant and what 
are idle and inadvertent. Just as by an act 
of your will, if need be, and in order to 
read this page, you must for the moment 
neglect the entire world, and confine your- 
self to the type and to the play of ideas 

53 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

and associations which it awakens in your 
mind ; and by so doing — so far as this 
present moment is concerned — you live 
and assert yourself. So, in all personal 
matters which involve choice, judgment, 
decision, in matters of life or of faith, 
what you shall do, how you shall believe, 
it is necessary, when face to face with your 
question, to put away things which are 
obviously extraneous, and, with what wis- 
dom you have, deal with the issue within 
narrower limits. In this way, by being 
faithful, that is to say, to himself in view 
of a narrow circle of relationships, a man 
will find that he is never really unfaithful 
to the wider demands of the whole world, 
if he could possibly be made aware of 
those demands. Plato would have de- 
stroyed the family on the ground that love 
given to one's friends, to one's home, was 
love withdrawn from society, from the 
wider human fellowship. But Aristotle 
had no diffiulty in replying, that without 
the family there would be no school for 

54 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

love at all, that the corner-stone of the 
State was the hearth-stone. So, the only 
school for the widest moral practice is, to 
be faithful in the issues which meet us 
within the narrower limits. To do other- 
wise, to refuse at each step to act, on the 
ground that if we only knew more, or 
knew everything, we should act differently, 
or not act at all, is really to mutilate our- 
selves ; it is in fact to propose an absurdity. 
The ultimate bearing of all these con- 
siderations and of this argument, brings us 
back to the question which emerges upon 
any series of study of the Pilgrims of the 
nineteenth century. I mean the question 
of personal faith in the light, and under 
the challenge of that immense knowledge 
of the world which our age has inherited 
and achieved. And, to keep close to 
Amiel, we see in him how the question 
comes to present itself. He fails to attain 
to certitude, to a happy and habitual con- 
fidence in God and in life's meaning, be- 
cause — to put it my own way — the evi- 

55 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

dence is not quite convincing. Now, the 
evidence for God can never in a sense be 
convincing ; that is to say, it can never be 
so indisputable as practically to coerce 
and overwhelm the human reason. Were 
that to take place, it would not be faith 
that ensued. Further, Amiel, as we have 
seen, will not take the only course which, 
as I think, so far confirms such faith as a 
man has : he will not proceed upon it. 
He failed, and could not but fail, because 
of those two conditions by which he bound 
himself. He would not believe once for 
all, because he was afraid that later knowl- 
edge might change his attitude ; and for 
the same reason he would not act strongly 
upon such incipient faith as from time to 
time offered itself to him. 

The very nature of faith in God, at 
least so it seems to me, demands that we 
act upon it on evidence short of absolute 
proof. Faith is most truly faith when it 
knows nothing but its own inspirations. 
Not that faith is entirely without evidence 

56 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

or without very sound evidence ; but simply 
because faith is always a personal act, it 
will always be possible for the individual 
to take the other alternative. One thing 
also, I think, may be claimed. There is a 
sense in which, to quote the language of 
remote days, man is the measure of the 
universe. What I mean just now by that 
is, that the world, the universe, life, has a 
wonderful way of corroborating that view of 
it which for your own reasons you are taking. 
Set out with the idea, with the faith, that 
life is from the moral point of view utterly 
careless, that "as it happeneth to the wise 
man, so it happeneth to the fool," — and 
the world, or your experience, will support 
that idea to some length ; but only to some 
length, and that not very far. Take, how- 
ever, a deeper, a holier view of things. 
Settle with yourself that life is not given 
us for self-pleasing, but for self-restraint, 
for the practice and fulfilment of certain 
purer calls, and once more, now that your 
ear is trained to finer sounds, you will 

57 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

catch the approval of things, the well done 
of some mysterious and authoritative 
voice. You will feel that there is some- 
thing in this world which appeals to you 
in a dumb, speechless way, to take the 
high road, the narrow road, through this 
world of ours. And even if you have no 
other foundation for the life of faith, that 
will serve, and if you are faithful to it, will, 
at the challenge of further things, become 
for you more and more. 

Men like Amiel seem to be afraid to 
believe heartily lest they should be duped ; 
but, as Professor James says, "I have also 
a horror of being duped, but I can believe 
that worse things than being duped may 
happen to a man in this world. Clifford's 
exhortation to us to avoid committing 
ourselves to any form of belief, lest we 
should discover later on that we had be- 
lieved wrongly, is like a general informing 
his soldiers that it is better to keep out of 
battle altogether than to risk a single 
wound/ ' And again, "As the essence of 

58 



Henri Frederic A?niel 

courage is to stake one's life on a possi- 
bility, so the essence of faith is to believe 
that that possibility exists." 

In conclusion, after reading Amiel and 
feeling, by our sympathy with him, the tor- 
ments of his divided soul — divided between 
his natural instincts, which in him, as in all 
men, are on the side of faith in life, those 
instincts warmed in his case by the spirit 
of his fathers, it may be, and by the natural 
poetry of his soul, — all that on the one 
hand ; and the challenge of knowledge on 
the other: after reading Amiel, and wit- 
nessing this pathetic struggle, we are 
tempted in one or other of two ways. We 
are tempted, as he was at the age of twenty- 
one, to wish that knowledge might cease 
from the earth. But even could that wish 
be fulfilled, it is even now too late. The 
fact is, it is not an honorable wish at all. 
God hath made us, and not we ourselves ; 
He has made us with the faculty for knowl- 
edge, and He has placed us likewise in a 
world where knowledge comes only by 

59 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

mental industry. The other temptation is 
to disparage and abandon reason alto- 
gether, to hand ourselves over to some 
visible guide, some institution, it may be, 
which is bold enough to declare that it has 
no misgivings. Yet that may be a tempta- 
tion which must be dealt with like other 
temptations. It is not fair or candid on 
the part of those who ask us to behold the 
anarchy into which reason has plunged us, 
it is not fair or candid, to contrast the pres- 
ent unsettlement with the state of perfect 
quietness, which would ensue, as it is al- 
leged, were we to render implicit obedience 
to some visible and human institution. The 
true opposition and contrast would be, be- 
tween the present unsettlement on the one 
hand, and the intellectual torpor, the cru- 
elty, the superstition, which did, as a matter 
of fact, accompany the days of unquestion- 
ing obedience. No, we have no right to 
will implicit obedience without willing the 
consequences of implicit obedience. The 
truth is, we must go on fighting our battle, 

60 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

not sadly at all, not with an ultimate sus- 
picion of all things, but with that ultimate 
confidence in all things, that faith in God, 
which Jesus Christ asked us to take once 
for all into our hearts and to live by, in 
spite of all signs. 

The demand for the quietness of cer- 
tainty may be a demand which God can 
not honorably satisfy, can not satisfy, that 
is to say, without injuring us, and spoiling 
His own plan in the human enterprise. In 
every department of our complicated life — 
intellectual, social, religious — we are at 
best only on the way y and therefore, of 
necessity, in movement. We can not hope 
for more than relative truth : we could not 
deal with more. Here, also, "as our day 
is so shall our strength be." And, "what 
but the weakness in a faith, supplies the 
incentive to humanity ?" The turning to 
visible authority may be nothing better 
than a concession to that love of ease which 
is ours in common with all animals, but 
which is no mark of the spiritual man. 

61 



V 



Henri Frederic Amiel 

There is really nothing to be deplored in 
our apparent insecurity. As a matter of 
fact, there are lamps for faithful souls. To 
everyone who meets life seriously the chal- 
lenge comes — to give his vote for one or 
other of two subtle, yet distinct and con- 
tending views. True, he may err in his 
decisions ; but I make bold to say that the 
errors of a faithful man are before God of 
small account. Domine, si error est, a 
Te decepti sumus. Meanwhile, a man has 
not failed, if in his choice, in his personal 
and solemn vote on matters which test the 
foundations of his life, he has decided for 
that course which, whatever hazards it may 
raise, seems to him the worthier. 

"The solving word for the learned and 
the unlearned man alike, lies, in the last 
resort, in the dumb willingnesses and un- 
willingnesses of their interior characters, 
and nowhere else. It is not in Heaven, 
neither is it beyond the sea ; but the word 
is very nigh to thee, in thy mouth and in 
thy heart, that thou may est do it." 

62 ' 



Walter Pater 



" The beauty of the world, and its sorrow, solaced a little by 
religious faith, itself so beautiful a thing ; these were the chief 
impressions with which he made his way outwards." 

Pater, in Gaston de Latour. 

64 



Walter Pater 

Probably there is no one word which 
describes adequately the total impression 
which Pater leaves upon one who reads him 
with submissiveness and sympathy ; as 
probably there is no one word which ad- 
equately describes the soul in any posture. 
Nevertheless, just as it is possible to name 
certain feelings which are present with us 
in any powerful mood, so we may discrim- 
inate certain lines or waves of influence 
which meet within us when we are under 
the spell of Pater. 

For one thing, we enjoy in him that 
sense of comfort, so to call it, which it is 
one of the finest tests of style to bring 
to us. Mere words, discreetly chosen, 
have a charm beyond their sense. This 
may be, nay, must be, in virtue of a pro- 
found and elementary correspondence be- 
5 65 



Walter Pater 

tween our soul and any manifestation of 
pure excellence. Certainly it is one of the 
proofs of style in words that they bring 
about us a certain atmosphere of comfort, 
of satisfaction, rising now and then to the 
pitch of a real exhilaration and joy. 

It must have been this, and not any- 
thing merely violent and strange, that 
Humbolt had in his mind when he said it 
would comfort him on his deathbed if some 
one would but read to him a few lines 
from Homer, were it only from the lists 
of the Greek ships ! He meant to say that 
choice and distinguished words themselves, 
apart from their content, have a compos- 
ing and reconciling quality ; that for him- 
self they would allure him into quietness, 
and set his soul at that angle from which 
only the hopeful and assuaging things are 
seen. 

If words selected faultlessly and ar- 
ranged have in themselves this unction, it 
is not strange that the writings of Walter 
Pater have such power — I will not say to 

66 



Walter Pater 

direct but — to nourish and promote the 
soul. In the case of Pater, even less than 
that of any other who has pushed his way 
into the heart of things, can we separate 
the style from the substance and intention 
of his work. With him, to a pre-eminent 
degree, the style is the man — the style with 
its strenuousness and gravity, " always on 
the look-out for the sincerities of human 
life" — to quote his own characterisation of 
another. 

In his work from first to last he was 
engaged with the soul of man, beset as 
man is in Pater's view of him, by a world 
of incidents, proceeding from himself, it 
may be, or coming to him from other times 
or from the face of nature, all of these in- 
cidents being capable of setting up corre- 
spondence with man as though he were 
inhabited by a spirit. It is most likely this 
— that he is ever concerned with the soul, 
with its delicate but significant movements 
— which gives Pater's writings for one 
something of that power for God which 

6 7 



Walter Pater 

one associates with the more excellent 
books of devotion — with Thomas a Kempis 
and the mystics. He belongs to the num- 
ber of elect ones who seem to be urged 
invincibly to indicate, if not to declare, the 
intimate history of their souls — who 
thereby minister to souls comparable to 
their own in essential things, to those who 
have ears to hear. Men of his spiritual 
degree, of his sensitiveness — Augustine, 
Dante, Bunyan, Goethe, Carlyle, Newman, 
Tolstoy, so unlike each other in particulars, 
so like in this that each was compelled by 
the things of his own spirit to urge and feel 
his way out of certain perplexities, and to 
win what victory he did win, for the most 
part, by laying bare his own condition — 
fulfill the office of the priesthood, standing 
between us and that infinite to which our 
spirits bear witness, it may be obscurely. 
That is an ingredient which is ever 
consciously with us so long as we are within 
the influence of Pater. He does us the 
immeasurable service of enabling us to ex- 

68 



Walter Pater 

press and unravel ourselves. His words, 
by reason of their fine knowledge, contin- 
uously make discoveries to us of ourselves 
— of our latent and potential selves. They 
become channels by which our soul finds 
its way out. And with what delicacy 
and reverence he deals with man ! What 
carefulness and reticence and hesitation! 
How he will not speak out ! How he will 
describe the behavior of the soul in given 
circumstances, always, at the same time, 
with a deference to you if you should hap- 
pen to think differently ! How he will try 
again, refining upon the previous predicate ! 
How he will wait for the right word — the 
word which shall reveal yet not limit or fix 
the soul ! To this, I believe, we must trace 
much of the secret of Pater's spiritual 
charm, and of the power over us which he, 
by his friendliness and consideration of us, 
comes to possess. He will assert nothing 
concerning the soul until we are ready to 
agree. He almost makes you say the word 
which ultimately comes. Witness, as illus- 

6 9 



Walter Pater 

trating what I mean, his habitual use of all 
manner of qualifying words and phrases. 
He can scarcely be brought to say any- 
thing which could have the effect of defining 
the soul. He will not speak of a feeling, 
but only of a kind of feeling, or of a sort 
of feeling. He will go up and down the 
scale of qualification by tones and half- 
tones, listening to each, seeking to " soften 
and modify the temerity of his proposi- 
tions" until the most scrupulous could 
take no offence, but must consent. 

It is probably true that this habit of qual- 
ification and endless misgiving over words, 
lest they should bear within themselves 
any " guilt or extravagance/' has become 
a mannerism and defect in Pater. But it 
is the defect of a quality which ministers 
directly to his value for the spirit. With 
him it is no affectation, as of one who wished 
to display his dexterity and niceness. It 
is with him an instinctive courtesy and rev- 
erence for the soul in all its sincere, that 
is to say, in all its truly personal, attitudes. 

70 



Walter Pater 

The work of Pater will always serve as 
a kind of confessional for those who, by 
their temperament or mental history, are 
aware of, and must always be aware of, a 
certain spirit of questioning in their relig- 
ious faith. And it is from that point of 
view that we shall go on immediately to 
consider that book of his which contains 
his most finished and deliberate message 
on the things of faith. There is a stage, 
and in our day amongst educated people 
it has become to be almost a necessary 
stage, at which the writings of Pater are 
able to define our troubles to ourselves, 
and, in a way, to deal with them as no 
writer whom I know can with equal dis- 
cernment. 

For, Pater always honors and cherishes 
the soul. True, he hesitates on the threshold 
of faith, but he hesitates with his face toward 
the door, nay, with his hand upon the latch. 
He will not turn away, he can not turn 
away. When all is said, he finds what 
ultimate support he has, in face of bafHing 

7i 



Walter Pater 

things, by listening to the singing and the 
prayers of those who are within the holy 
place, and far within. 

If he is not " very sure of God," he is 
profoundly aware of the human soul and 
of its boundless relationships. He is " al- 
most persuaded," not quite; and yet his 
most personal writing has a vividness, a 
power, a certain evidence of God, which 
are often not to be felt at all in the writ- 
ings of those who profess that they have 
no doubt, but see God clearly. 

There was, to the end, " a certain appe- 
tite for dimness," as he calls it, in Pater's 
spiritual nature. "Physical twilight," he 
says, "we most of us love in its season. 
To him, that perpetual twilight came in 
close identity with its moral or intellectual 
counterpart as the welcome requisite for 
that part of the soul which loves twilight, 
and is, in truth, never quite at rest out of 
it, through some congenital uneasiness or 
distress, perhaps, in its processes of vision. 

Because of this unfailing sympathy with 
72 



Walter Pater 

the human soul in all its real processes, 
however humble and obscure they may be, 
the best of Pater's work has the salt of an 
immortal life and fitness. To those who 
understand, it enshrines the faithful record 
of a human pilgrimage. It is "an artistic 
reception of a human experience." Thus 
far, at least, his contribution is on the side 
of faith, that he will not mock or disparage 
man, but is ever ready to catch some no- 
bility of the soul, some uprising of gener- 
osity, however fleeting, as evidence that, 
in the ebb and flow of things, something, 
it may be, after all, stands fast, and that 
even in this human world that something 
may very credibly have its counterpart, its 
foundation and source and consummation 
— its idea, to quote Plato — in an everlasting 
order. "Those invincible prepossessions 
of humanity or of the individual, which 
Bacon reckoned 'idols of the cave,' are 
no offence to him ; are direct informations, 
it may be, beyond price, from a kindly 
spirit in things.' ' 

73 



Walter Pater 

Pater, we repeat, is one of those who 
J write for their own sakes. They are called 
by the spirit to speak. Men of his spirit- 
ual rank acknowledge an imperious need 
to declare how things are going on within 
them. They write in order that they may 
discover themselves. To straighten out 
the things of the spirit, to fix and name the 
obscure movements of the soul within, is 
laid upon minds of a certain quality like a 
doom, and it is a fire in their bones if they 
refrain. It is the one true call to the min- 
istry of God amongst one's fellow-men. 
In this matter Pater was of the elect. 

In his actual life, in Oxford, in London, 
he was an elusive and impenetrable figure. 
It was doubtless the penalty of his very 
delicate spiritual organization that few, 
even amongst his equals in many matters, 
knew him to any profitable degree. It 
must have been a difficult and unwilling 
business for Pater to deal with men in a 
frank and unreserved way. In his books, 
however, he has amply fulfilled that obliga- 

74 



Walter Pater 

tion, which surely rests upon us all, to speak 
with simplicity and kindness to those with 
whom we find ourselves on the long high- 
way of our life. For his books, strictly 
speaking, contain little besides his own 
"sensations and ideas." Even in his writ- 
ings he shrinks, as we have said, from all 
definiteness, and avoids, by the very habit 
of his mind, anything like unqualified as- 
sertion, employing the impersonal method 
of parable, or story, or criticism. But 
throughout, it is a veil which hides nothing 
that it is profitable for us to know. In 
Pater's view, such reticence and self-effacing 
is but a true man's modesty face to face 
with life — with life which, in its length and 
breadth, and depth and height, no one 
presumes to know without possibility of 
error. 

In " Marius, the Epicurean," Pater has, 
I believe, confessed himself in the only way 
in which a man of his temperament, of his v 
privacy, could make himself known. He 
has told a story. It is the story of a life 

75 



Walter Pater 

with features which he dwells on so know- 
ingly, encountering circumstances which 
he describes with such tenderness and in- 
sight, moving on to a crisis and event 
which he conceives with such persuasive- 
ness and grace,\the whole living in such an 
air of reality that, in dealing with such a 
story, we are dealing, we may believe, with 
all that was substantial and permanent, in 
Pater's own spiritual career. 

Marius is a young Roman of noble 
family who lived under the reign of Marcus 
Aurelius. We meet him first as a boy in 
his country home. And there already, 
Pater has the materials with which no one 
can deal with a tenderer understanding. 
For with Pater, a boy is ever the type of 
the beautiful, of the comely, of the soul it- 
self; and with him the most precious 
instincts and loyalties which a man may 
take with him into life are just those which 
had their nourishment in the pieties, 
the affections, and the secrets of home. 
From the outset we feel that Marius is no 

76 



Walter Pater 

ordinary boy ; and yet it may be that he is 
little different from most children. What 
distinguishes him from other boys may be 
that in his case that early sensitiveness, 
that openness to the unseen, that poetry 
and faith with which all children set out 
upon life, were not contradicted or poisoned 
by the careless brutality of older people. 

The father had died while Marius was 
yet a little child, so that as a boy he could 
not recall what his father had been like. 
But he often thought about his father, 
vaguely and not always happily, not know- 
ing anything surely. Marius, as was nat- 
ural, grew up in a peculiarly dear and 
intimate friendship with his mother, the 
very absence of a father making itself felt 
in a certain seriousness and wisdom, which 
gave to their relationship something of the 
sentiment of religion. " Marius, even thus 
early, came to think of women's tears, of 
women's hands to lay one to rest in death 
as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of 
natural want." 

77 



Walter Pater 

From his earliest days, as Marius could 
recall when he had left those days far be- 
hind, he loved the simple ways of the 
country, its casual sounds, its quiet and 
even manners. From the first, he was ac- 
quainted with those elementary conditions 
of life — seed-time and harvest, the morning 
and the evening, the labourers in the field, 
the sheep and cattle out at pasture or in 
the fold — those elementary conditions, a 
reverence for which was a great part of 
primitive religion. 

There were signs, too, even in those 
earliest days, of a profound sympathy for 
the sufferings of others, especially of the 
dumb creatures. And this laid the basis, 
or was itself an early sign, of a view of life 
which was always present to him, namely, 
that pain was in some way an integral part 
arra^ constituent of the world, and that 
true goodness consisted largely of tender 
thoughts and tender actions towards the 
afflicted. 

It was in deference to this feeling of 

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Walter Pater 

humanity towards dumb creatures that as 
a boy he destroyed the snares with which 
he was wont to entrap the wild birds. " A 
white bird," his mother once told him look- 
ing at him gravely, "a bird which he must 
carry in his bosom across a crowded pub- 
lic place — his own soul was like that." 

As being the head of the household, it 
fell to him, though still a boy, to perform 
the religious rites of the home ; and this he 
did, always with a natural and unaffected 
seriousness, understanding, as it seemed, 
their inner meaning. Indeed, partly, doubt- 
less by virtue of a grace with which he was 
born, partly also as the effect for him of 
the quietness and seclusion of his early 
surroundings, Marius took with him into 
life a bias and predisposition towards the * 
religious view. " He was apt to be happy 
in sacred places," he said of himself. 
Whatever was ancient, whatever had taken 
part with man in his long wrestling with 
the mystery of things and with his own ex- 
perience, had the power at once of touch- 

79 



Walter Pater 

ing Marius, of letting loose within him the 
fountain of pity and brotherhood. 

" In the sudden tremor of an aged voice, 
the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish 
drawing, in the tacit observance of a day, 
he became aware suddenly of the great 
stream of human tears falling always 
through the shadows of the world." Such 
was Marius, at the close of his boyhood, and 
before he had left, even for a short season, 
the shelter of his mother's nearness. 

From this point events followed quickly, 
and of a kind that could not but accentuate 
and confirm the habits and preferences of 
which he had already given signs. He fell 
into an illness which necessitated his leav- 
ing home for a time. Perhaps it was dur- 
ing this illness of his and in consequence 
of it that he fell into the way of communing 
with himself, of making plain to himself 
how things were affecting his outlook upon 
life in general ; of realizing to his own 
mind such difficulties and things hard to 
understand as arose out of the events of 

80 



Walter Pater 

his life ; of meeting quite candidly and of 
dealing with, as satisfactorily as he was 
able at each stage, those doubts and 
troubles of the mind, which from to time 
invaded his equanimity and threatened 
such faith as he possessed. 

Brought into contact thus young with 
pain, and with the prospect, it might be, 
however remote, of death, Marius, to whom 
it was always a necessity to be honest with 
himself, was compelled to come to his own 
conclusion about life as it presented itself 
to him. 

Shortly after his return home his mother 
died. Pater does not dwell upon her death 
or much upon the boy's feeling — that would 
have been too violent for his art. No 
modern writer knows more sympathetically 
than does Pater the immense sufferings of 
which children are capable, children at least 
from whom anything fine is to be looked 
for later on in the way of feeling. But he 
knows also that there is that within a boy 
— his very capital and resource of life — 
6 81 



Walter Pater 

which leads him after a time away from 
events on which it is not good or safe for 
him that he should dwell long. 

As for Marius, the image of his mother 
never left his heart. In the very cast of 
his mind, in the demand which he made 
upon every faith which offered itself to 
him — that it should leave room for the play 
of tenderness, that it should be the conse- 
cration of what he himself had experienced 
as the dearest of our earthly relationships 
— in these ways he manifested his loyalty 
to her who bore him, who also by the 
gradual ministry of affection had prepared 
his heart for every high claim that might 
yet appeal to it. All through his spiritual 
history, as he himself came to see only 
towards the end of his life, faith for him 
always had in it a certain home-sickness, 
a certain yearning for a place made sacred 
by memories and a beloved presence, from 
which to set out in the morning, proposing 
to oneself high things, to which to return 
sure of a welcome, sure of refreshment 

82 



Walter Pater 

and clean rest, as it were in the evening, 
after a journey. To Marius, the faith of 
a man could not be more highly conceived 
than as the early ties of home and kin- 
dred, confirmed and purified, that which 
was natural made spiritual by the stress 
of our later life, by the separations which 
only discover to us how much we are to 
one another. It was out of a tempera- 
ment of this kind, attuned by the affec- 
tions of those first days, that later on he 
could say that "in our close clinging one 
to another he seemed to touch the Eter- 
nal." Marius could never have been finally 
satisfied with any faith which denied that 
there is, and this because there must be, 
a heart of tenderness like the heart of a 
mother, behind a veil. 

At school, to which soon after his 
mother's death he went, he was from the 
first attracted to a youth named Flavian, 
somewhat older than himself. The two 
became close friends, though Marius was 
conscious of something in the tempera- 

83 



Walter Pater 

ment of Flavian and in the range and kind 
of his motives which would always keep 
them at a certain distance from each other. 
Flavian was one of those of whom we 
say, that "they are bound to succeed." 
With him intellectual difficulties, however 
much he might acknowledge them, would 
never be permitted to interfere with that 
worldly success which was the main busi- 
ness. Even at the age when Marius met 
him he would often speak with zest of 
what he would do, and what place he 
would strive for in the jostling world of 
men. But the two were much together. 
Together they read "The Golden Book of 
Apuleius," including the pathetic tale, full 
of a warm and exciting symbolism, of 
Cupid and Psyche. It was a memorable 
experience for Marius, giving him as it 
did his first glimpse into that glorious but 
hazardous world of sentiment which we 
associate honorably with sex. It brought 
over him a tremor, at least, of that con- 
vulsion which was to shake Dante at the 

8 4 



Walter Pater 

age of nine. As Pater says, "a book, like 
a person, has its fortunes with one; is 
lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of 
its falling in our way, and often by some 
happy accident counts with us for some- 
thing more than its independent value." 
The reading- Q f "The Golden Book of 
Apuleius " was the touch that alone was 
needful to quicken into life certain gener- 
ous elements of his nature which forever 
afterwards would claim their due in any 
theory of things, in any faith which he might 
adopt. 

Another event happening about this 
time made its sombre addition to Manus' 
burden of human and inevitable experi- 
ences. Flavian was stricken by the plague, 
which about this time began to devastate 
Rome and the neighboring country, a 
plague the seeds of which it is commonly, 
believed the Roman Campagna retains to 
this day. After a short, fierce illness the 
bright youth died. Marius had tended 
him like a mother, noting the pathetic 

85 



Walter Pater 

changes in the patient's countenance as 
death urged home its ruthless assault. On 
the last night, Marius lay as usual in the 
bed beside him, to be near him if he should 
seem to need anything. "Is it a com- 
fort," he whispered to the dying lad, " that 
I shall often come and weep over you ?" 
" Not unless I be aware," he faltered, 
" and hear you weeping I" 

The death of Flavian had the effect of 
sending Marius back into the solitude of 
his own mind. He was conscious for a 
time of nothing but a profound anger 
against nature — an indignation against 
things as they are — the blindness of them, 
and terrible unconcern. But this death — 
and this is often the virtue of an added 
sorrow — had that influence upon him which 
real suffering never failed to produce; it 
let loose within him a great wave of pity 
for his fellow-men, considering afresh the 
burdens which they were doomed to bear, 
by the help of such dim lights. 

If there was anything in Marius at this 
86 



Walter Pater 

stage which we might call faith, the death 
of Flavian served for a time to eclipse it, 
leaving him in darkness. That death, with 
all its accompaniments, as he now recalled 
them, seemed to mean only one thing, that 
the soul of Flavian had at that moment 
been extinguished. 

It is the great merit of Pater' s ' ' Marius, ' ' 
and a thing which will secure for this book 
a permanent place in the confessional liter- 
ature of the soul, that it always conceives 
faith as the reaction which a man makes 
against the incidents, the events of his life, 
as they variously come home to him. 

Faith in " Marius" is perhaps best de- 
scribed as a man's reconciliation with him- 
self and with the world in which he finds 
himself. 

Marius was too good a Stoic and too 
much of a man to permit even such a fact 
as death — though it were to be established 
as a final and unrelieved fact — to paralyse 
that vitality of youth which was equally a 
fact, and having the claims of a fact. 

87 



Walter Pater 

He found a measure ot relief in a 
method of treating himself which amounted 
to this : he compelled himself to look away 
from all the paralysing and disheartening 
things. He resolved to limit himself to 
the things that were actually before him, 
refusing meanwhile to raise any ultimate 
questions. There were many good things 
in life even for a soul like his. He deter- 
mined that he would excel. He would 
furnish his mind, making it, as it were, a 
beautiful and comely abode. It might be 
that this present life, brief as it was, was 
all. Still, even so, there was no need that 
he should adopt the baser conclusion, say- 
ing, "All is vanity, therefore let me eat 
and drink, for to-morrow I die." Rather, 
suppose that for him there were no to- 
morrow, death ending all, still it was not 
in the power of circumstances to rob him 
of his inner dignity and erectness. He 
would " adorn and beautify his soul." 

I must deny myself the digressions 
which are inviting me at every step, turning 

88 



Walter Pater 

aside here for one moment only to observe 
how every great work in literature, which 
has dealt at first hand with the human soul, 
has described this stage in a true man's 
recovery from the overthrow of his life 
after the first harmony has been broken by 
mortal sin, it may be, or by the spirit of 
questioning. To this place also Carlyle 
had come when standing, as it seemed to 
him, in a shivered world, he yet had the 
health to see that a man never was without 
a duty, a thing which required him to act 
immediately ; that even in a shivered uni- 
verse it was open to a man to "build up 
a universe within his own soul. ,, To this 
stage also Faust came when he thought to 
restore the soundness of his disordered 
mind by a determined occupation of him- 
self with the beauty of Greece. 

And this is the very spot in the world 
of the soul whereon Dante stood when he 
awoke in the dark forest, and seeing above 
him a hill with the sun shining on its slopes, 
essayed to climb it, and failed. 

8 9 



Walter Pater 

In course of time Marius went to Rome 
to take his place as amanuensis to the 
Emperor Marcus Aurelius. On the way 
he encountered casually one who was des- 
tined to wield a quite immeasurable influ- 
ence upon him. He met Cornelius, a 
young noble, a soldier of the Twelfth 
Legion. 

Pater, on behalf of Marius, taxes his 
copious insight in describing to us the pe- 
culiar quality which was manifest in Cor- 
nelius, the atmosphere which clung to him, 
that grace of his which wrought so power- 
fully upon his hero. 

In a word, Cornelius was a Christian, a 
Christian of the chaste and virgin days, 
when persecution purged the Church, suf- 
fering only those who were saints indeed 
to bear the sacred name. 

' 'Some inward standard Marius seemed 
to detect in Cornelius there (though wholly 
unable to estimate its nature), of distinc- 
tion, selection, refusal, amid the various 
elements of the fervid and corrupt life 

90 



Walter Pater 

across which they were moving together; 
some secret, constraining motive, ever on 
the alert at eye and ear, which carried him 
through Rome as under a charm, so that 
Marius could not but think of that figure 
of the white-bird in the market place as 
made true of him." (You see there the 
hint of his mother's face.) 

Again, "with all the severity of Corne- 
lius, there was (at the same time) a breeze 
of hopefulness — freshness and hopefulness 
— as of new morning about him." It was 
evident to Marius, further, that everything 
about Cornelius "seemed to be but sign 
or symbol of some other thing far beyond 
it." He seemed to live recognising "a 
light upon his way which had certainly not 
yet sprung up for Marius." The most 
delicate and suggestive feature in Pater's 
description of Cornelius is that Marius ob- 
served that he was "constantly singing to 
himself." This singing was never loud or 
uncontrolled. It was to Marius quite a 
new kind of singing. It was rather the 

9i 



Walter Pater 

gentle overflow of some quiet and gener- 
ous emotion. He would begin to sing as 
though at the moment he were remembering 
some private reason for being happy, not 
that he ever really forgot it. 

In everything that Pater says about 
Rome — in the circumstances which he se- 
lects, in the events which he accentuates, 
above all, in the background against which 
the figures move, a background of luxury 
and grossness in high places, of frivolity 
and the lust for bloody spectacles on the 
part of the masses of the people, groups 
here and there of rhetoricians and sophists, 
idlers and loafers in the spiritual world all 
of them, who used words never as the basis 
of personal action, but merely as playthings 
to illustrate their own dexterity and to fill 
the empty hours ; an age which believed 
nothing, in which the best wisdom recom- 
mended people to take up the attitude of 
apathy, the attitude of half-amused, half- 
contemptuous spectators, not to expect 
very much of mankind, just as you do not 

92 



Walter Pater 

expect fruit-trees to be other than they are ; 
and through all this and behind it, haunting 
everything, giving to everything a certain 
exaggeration (behind everything), the ter- 
rible plague dealing death swiftly — in all 
this, I say, Pater means us to understand, 
that his Marius, on entering Rome, came 
into contact with that mingled and dubious 
life which a youth of his mind and temper- 
ament encounters now when he meets for 
the first time the forces and currents of our 
present-day world. 

On the night he entered Rome, at dusk, 
Marius heard a call out in the streets — a 
call, as it was put, "to play." "Donee 
virenti canities abest," a voice sang — "to 
those in whom their life is still green." At 
that moment Marius remembered Corne- 
lius, bethought himself how Cornelius 
would have taken a call like that. Per- 
haps it was the first victory of the living and 
permanent Christ over the mind of Marius ! 

His life in Rome was one long disillu- 
sionment. He had gone there to fill a 

93 



Walter Pater 

post near to the person of the philosophic 
Emperor. He had gone full of the wor- 
thiest anticipations. But he learned how 
life puts to the test principles which seem 
invincible in books. He learned how there 
is that in man, and infecting society, work- 
ing its way on all sides towards ruin and 
catastrophe, a something which will not be 
harnessed, or scotched, or eradicated by 
mere philosophy, still less by a philosophy 
which amounted to nothing but a studied 
blindness towards all disturbing things, a 
confession that all was lost indeed, but that 
we might harden our hearts at least and 
say nothing about it. He learned, though 
obscurely and scarcely putting it to him- 
self so definitely, that we wrestle with a 
spirit, a Prince of Darkness ; and Marius 
separated himself from the Emperor and 
the moralists just at that point. 

They seemed to him to acquiesce in 
the evil and brutality which were rampant, 
though these on their own principles were 
unworthy of man. Aurelius was able to 

94 



Walter Pater 

look on, apparently without active disgust, 
at the bloodshed of the amphitheatre. He 
could make it consistent with himself to 
decree human sacrifices. And in these 
matters Marius, by virtue of his own purer 
instincts, reinforced as they now were by 
the gracious personality of Cornelius, felt 
"that Aurelius was his inferior now and 
forever on the question of righteousness/ ' 
4 'Surely," he said, "evil is a real thing, 
and the wise man wanting in the sense of 
it, where not to have been by instinctive 
election on the right side is to have failed 
in life." 

It was not only when he allowed his 
mind to dwell upon the bloodshed and in- 
humanity of the amphitheater that Marius 
became aware of a profound separateness 
between himself and those who — with the 
Emperor — were prepared to encourage, or 
at least not to forbid, such spectacles. In the 
greater part of the entire work Pater is 
engaged in showing how two processes 
were going on beneath the surface in the 

95 



Walter Pater 

soul of Marius — two processes, perhaps 
really one process, tending certainly to one 
result. It had been demonstrated to him 
in many a notable incident which he could 
recall, and it was being demonstrated to 
him daily in the loose, unreal, immoral, and 
despairing atmosphere of both private and 
public life, that even the boasted philoso- 
phy of Marcus Aurelius was but a branch 
of literature, a thing of words and phrases, 
without passion, or power, or purpose, 
because without any confidence in itself. 
It could accomplish nothing, face to face 
with the potent, and — for it — the inerad- 
icable impulses and weaknesses of man. 
Nay, in the presence of Marius, admitted 
as he was to the home-life of the Emperor, 
and able to see him when he was off his 
guard, many a thing had happened which 
had but one meaning — that the Emperor 
was a most unhappy man, who only with a 
tragical suppression of his true feelings suc- 
ceeded in keeping up a brave front before 
the world. Compelled by his experience 

9 6 



Walter Pater 

to lower one light after another, the Em- 
peror seemed to be moving toward a view 
of life which left no room for hope, for the 
expansion of the human heart. He had 
lately uttered sentiments which could only 
mean that in certain circumstances it might 
be justifiable for one who could bear the 
strain no more to lay violent hands upon 
himself. " 'Tis part of the business of life," 
he had written, " to lose it handsomely.' * 
" On due occasion one might give life the 
slip." And Marius could not help con- 
trasting this wearied air which hung about 
the court and about society with the blithe- 
ness as of the fresh morning which he 
never failed to feel like a breeze from the 
face of his one Christian friend, Cornelius. 
About this time, too, Marius witnessed 
something which was not meant for his 
eyes, but which he could not do otherwise 
than see. One of the young princes who 
was very dear to his father was pronounced 
to be dying; and Marius "saw the Em- 
peror carry the child away, pressed close 

7 97 



Walter Pater 

to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for 
one thing only, to be united, to be abso- 
lutely one with it, in its obscure distress/' 

All this was part of a process which 
was going on within the mind of Marius. 
He was discovering new evidence each 
day that the best thought of his time, so 
far as it had become articulate, failed, ab- 
solutely and tragically, to account for, or 
to give energy to men to deal with, the 
facts — the sins and sufferings of our life. 
And parallel to this movement, hurrying it 
to its conclusion, was that other, which had 
begun within Marius at the moment when 
Cornelius crossed his path. 

For the peculiar grace which he ac- 
knowledged that he found nowhere except 
in Cornelius began now to identify itself 
somehow with everything that had really 
been beautiful and satisfying in his past 
experience. 

The image of Cornelius began to be a 
center round which gathered everything 
that had ever appealed to him in a tender 

9 8 



Walter Pater 

way. It seemed to him, for example, as 
though the grace of his departed mother, 
now become more powerful that life, had 
set him so much apart, was of the same 
kind as the influence which he acknowl- 
edged in Cornelius. He had the feeling 
that his mother had always intended — quite 
unconsciously, of course — those very things 
which Cornelius stood for. 

Certainly life had discovered to Marius 
a void place, and it required something 
like an effort on his part — an effort which 
he could probably not have justified to 
himself — to keep him from yielding himself 
up to Cornelius, asking him plainly for his 
so precious secret. 

Both of these movements that were go- 
ing on within him, of disintegration on the 
one hand, and of reconciliation on the 
other, received about this time what to his 
sensitive and religious mind seemed to 
have the highest sanction. For one night 
"the last bequest of a serene sleep had 
been a dream in which, as once before he 

99 
LOFC. 



Walter Pater 

heard those he loved best, pronouncing his 
name very pleasantly as they passed 
through the rich light and shadow of a 
summer morning, along the pavement of a 
city — ah, fairer far than Rome." It was 
at this stage, too, that Marius one day sud- 
denly asked himself this question. Since 
life faced candidly and honourably dis- 
covers to us that there are certain beliefs, 
presuppositions, principles, which we men, 
being such as we are, and placed as we 
are, simply cannot do without, may it not 
be that the fact itself that we cannot do 
without them is sufficient evidence that 
they are true ? 

Thus was Marius coming gradually, by 
the way of imagination and by the help of 
a certain tenderness in his very reasonings, 
to a willingness to believe in Him whom 
Christians worship as the father of men. 

But I must hasten to conclude : and this 
we now may, without injury to the whole 
spirit of Pater's work. For it would be 
more than Pater intended were we to 

ioo 



Walter Pater 

speak with greater definiteness of what 
belell Marius in the region of his beliefs, 
It is never Pater's way to speak out; he 
will only hint or give a cue. Nevertheless, 
Marius did take some further steps towards 
the peaceful healing of his long divided 
mind. 

One evening, as it was drawing to 
dusk, Marius and Cornelius, on their way 
into Rome, halted at a door which Cor- 
nelius seemed to know. He knocked and 
they were admitted. It was the home of 
Cecelia, a young Roman lady of noble 
family, who had been left a widow by 
Cecelius — a confessor and saint. She was 
a Christian. As Cornelius stood at the 
open door he looked at his companion for 
a moment, as though to say : " There is still 
time for you to refuse to enter. There is 
still time for you to go on, on your usual 
way. For, if you enter, if you come within 
the influence of this home, you will never 
be able, and you will never desire to break 
away from its spirit and from its faith.' ' 

IOI 



Walter Pater 

And Marius crossed the threshold, 
knowing dimly, but quite unmistakably, 
that he had in some way closed a door be- 
hind him, and had now committed himself 
beyond recall for ever to that view of things 
which had been appealing to him for so 
long. 

I shall not attempt to describe this 
sweet and holy home. If there is even one 
such home remaining in the world to-day, 
all is well, and the wild and homeless heart 
of man will not be able to resist its plea 
for ever. 

Here again, the first sound that fell 
upon his ears was the sound of children 
singing. Chaste women and their children 
— that was what the home of Cecelia came 
to stand for ever afterward in Marius* 
mind. To him that home was like a bride 
adorned for her husband, its orderliness 
and seriousness like the eager and happy 
aspect of one who is looking for the com- 
ing in at any moment of some exalted yet 
not formidable Guest. 

102 



Walter Pater 

That evening, and more than once in 
the days that followed, Marius had oppor- 
tunities to test, if he had been so minded, 
the spirit of this Christian home. But 
there was that in it which set all his ques- 
tionings to rest. Here, if anywhere, was 
the only proper life for man ; here was the 
final and all-including point of view. In 
contrast with the despair which infected the 
wisest in his day was the radiant and habit- 
ual hopefulness of these people. He saw 
the graves of their little children, the 
flowers, the dainty loving signs, showing 
that these people agreed with him in re- 
garding even the body with a certain rev- 
erence and hope. Death had been often 
here ; but it had left no sting, no bitterness. 
It had brought an added grace to their 
daily living ; it had only confirmed that 
faith of theirs which seemed so full of ten- 
derness ; it had only added yet another 
treasure to the great sum of glorious things 
which later on, and in a better place, would 
be given them of their father. 

103 



Walter Patev 

"The temperate beauty " of this Chris- 
tian lady " reminded Marius of the best 
female statuary of Greece." In her he 
seemed to have encountered the type of 
a new and regenerate world. Here he 
saw how the body might be redeemed, and 
could be redeemed only by the spirit. 

Here, likewise, he saw human industry 
become sacred and mystical — the daily 
tasks of life done as beneath the eye and 
for the sake of a dear Master who would 
not fail to note the humblest fidelity. Here, 
in Cecilia, never seen by Marius except 
with a child in her arms or walking by her 
side, he saw that new consecration of ma- 
ternity, that new hallowing of the simple 
and elementary things of life which was 
then dawning upon the world in the story 
of Mary and her Child. 

It may have been that Marius became 
conscious of a new feeling toward Cecilia 
herself, arising or threatening to arise in 
his own heart. But even were that so, it 
was another fine result of the new spirit 

104 



Walter Pater 

which was now dealing with him. For, if 
it was love, it was love as he had never 
known it, as no old poet had ever described 
it. In his case it was a sentiment full of 
reverence, serious and reticent ; a love 
which would be satisfied, not so much by 
attainment as by self-denials and suffering. 
It was a love which would make him ready, 
which even now had made him ready to 
endure to the uttermost for its own sake, 
and for the wealth which he knew would 
come to him and overwhelm the pain. 

And soon Marius was called upon to 
suffer for his faith, such as it was. Perse- 
cution of a fierceness hitherto unknown 
swept over the Church. Marius himself 
heard one read the letters from the churches 
of Lyons and Vienne, including the story 
of Blandina, the Christian girl who died 
under the tortures of the arena, whispering 
with her last breath, "I am Christ' s." 

It was in these dark days that Marius 
was stricken with the plague, with that 
mysterious instrument of death which had 



Walter Pater 

all through his life been so much in his 
thoughts. Cornelius was with him at the 
time, and both were taken prisoners as 
being Christians. It was known that one 
of the two had not openly professed the 
Christian faith, but, uncertain as to which 
it was, the soldiers bore both away. That 
night Marius bribed the guard to set Cor- 
nelius free, for he supposed that Cornelius 
loved Cecilia. As for himself, the fever 
heightened so that he had to be left behind. 
In the pauses of his delirium he became 
aware that the simple people into whose 
hands he had come were Christians also. 
He heard them pray over him, accepting 
him as being without doubt one of their 
faith. He felt the mystic bread between 
his lips, and in his weakness he did not re- 
fuse it. "Abi, abi, anima Christiana " — 
Depart, depart, O Christian soul — he heard 
them pray; and as for the rest, "in the 
grey austere evening of that day they took 
up his remains and buried them secretly 
with their accustomed prayers, but with 

1 06 



Walter Pater 

joy also, holding his death, according to 
their generous view in this matter, to have 
been of the nature of a martyrdom ; and 
martyrdom, as the Church had always said, 
was a kind of sacrament with plenary 
grace." 

That is Pater's story of " Marius the 
Epicurean.' ' It all means many things ; 
it means, indeed, everything. 

We might describe the total influence 
of the book in Pater's own words elsewhere, 
and say that it is the story of how, at last, 
"a man's sleepless habit of analysis had 
been checked by the inexplicable, the abso- 
lute ; how, amid his jealously guarded in- 
difference of soul, he had been summoned 
to yield, and had yielded, to the magnetic 
influence of another." 

Or, we might say, quoting something 
which came into Marius' mind even when 
the dimness of death was in his eyes, 
namely, this : that in Jesus Christ and His 
followers, "there had been a permanent 
protest established in the world, a plea, 

107 



Walter Pater 

a perpetual afterthought, which humanity 
would ever henceforth possess in reserve, 
against any wholly mechanical theory of 
itself and its conditions. ,, 

For myself, I close "Marius" once 
again, with two feelings in my mind, two 
purposes, two standards by which to judge 
myself henceforward. They are the two 
feelings which Marius tells us came quite 
distinctly to him when, one Christmas 
morning, he was leaving the church in 
Cecilia's home, having been present at 
worship there. One closes " Marius" with 
the feeling, first, that now since we have 
tasted a joy of this purity and tenderness, 
one will always have, and ought always to 
have, a kind of thirst for it again; and 
second, one has the feeling, after such an 
experience, that it was surely in order to 
give us such a taste of what life might be, 
and to make us capable of receiving it 
(such draughts of Lethe and Eunoe), that 
" the Power who created us sent us into this 
world — not that we should be unhappy in it." 

1 08 



Walter Pater 

Pater himself died suddenly in middle 
life ; in middle faith also, as I think. At 
the close of a wistful and perplexing day, 
a day which grew clearer for him, as we 
wish to believe, in its later hours, Pater fell 
asleep, like Dante, on sloping stairs ! 

"And we are left to speculate," as he 
wrote of Leonardo da Vinci, "how one 
who always loved beauty, and loved it in 
such precise forms . . . looked forward 
to the vague land, and experienced the 
last curiosity." 



109 



Leo Tolstoy 



"The power with which we are convinced of anything is 
full, complete, unshakable, not when our arguments are logically 
irrefutable, nor when our feelings correspond with the demands 
of reason, but when man becomes convinced through experi- 
ence, having tested the opposite, that there is only one way. 
Such a power of conviction we are given as to there being only 
one life, the following of the will of God." — Demands of Love 
and Romance, 



Leo Tolstoy 

One rises from a long reading of " Tol- 
stoy " with a new understanding of what 
the old Hebrew belief may have signified, 
that whosoever presumes to look upon the 
face of God shall surely die. A merciful 
Providence (shall we say?) has taken pre- 
cautions in the case of nearly all of us to blur 
our vision, to turn the last edge and keen- 
ness of our sensibilities, lest we should see 
more or feel more than we could bear or 
deal with. The same Providence, however, 
which spares men in the mass, endowing 
us with a certain last cowardice by virtue 
of which we will not stand or remain quite 
alone on the dim and tragic headlands of 
the spiritual world, has ordained that elect 
souls, here and there, from time to time, 
urged by an invincible calling, shall go out 
from us and face that Infinite on our be- 
8 113 



Leo Tolstoy 

half. " Death worketh in them but life 
in us. 

Tolstoy belongs by every sign to this 
priestly order of men, who by their insight, 
by their gift of solitary thinking, of moral 
loneliness and suffering, hold man to his 
destiny. 

It is not with Tolstoy's message with 
the dogmatic teaching which has come to 
be associated with his name, that we pro- 
pose to engage ourselves at this time, but 
with Tolstoy from a very definite and ex- 
clusive standpoint. We propose to con- 
sider what to myself is his most precious 
contribution to our own time, and surely 
to all time, namely, the story of his spir- 
itual pilgrimage — how the first harmony 
of life came to be destroyed within him, 
and how after many a trial and many a 
defeat a new harmony was at length es- 
tablished. 

In its deepest principles — in its "form," 
as Plato would have said — Tolstoy's spir- 
itual story differs in no way from that of 

114 



Leo Tolstoy 

Augustine, or Dante, or Goethe, or Car- 
lyle. It is the story which has its classical 
setting in the Book of Job. . Once again we 
watch a human soul in which the faith of 
childhood has been assailed by thought, by 
experience, drifting, yet always with many 
a cry of protest, out into the homeless seas: 
encountering there, by virtue of something 
ineradicable within itself and by virtue of 
something ineradicable in the nature of 
things, a crisis which puts a limit to its 
outward drifting and turns it passionately 
homeward. 

Whilst it is quite true that Tolstoy's 
pilgrimage from the first unity of childhood 
back through misery and a crisis to a firm 
and sufficient harmony with himself and 
with life is in its salient and permanent fea- 
tures not new, nevertheless, simply because 
he is also a real and unaffected man who 
has fought his own battle with his own 
weapons, his story is altogether his own. 
Over and above those differences which 
subsist between all human beings, so that 



Leo Tolstoy 

no two men who candidly reveal themselves 
to their fellow men ever say quite the same 
things, in the case of Tolstoy larger ele- 
ments of a distinguishing kind have entered, 
and have given his testimony, features and 
qualities which were not elsewhere to be 
met with. There are, for example, two sets 
of circumstances which, crossing each other 
indeed and mingling, yet make separate 
contributions to Tolstoy's life and to his ex- 
pression of himself. For one thing he has 
lived his life in Russia ; and for another 
thing, the abiding life of Russia, its soul, 
its temperament lives in him. From these 
two separate considerations, for they are 
separate, Tolstoy's personal history de- 
rives its most impressive and singular 
features. 

When I say that Tolstoy has lived his 
life in Russia, I mean by Russia not simply 
a geographical name : I mean that he, an 
enlightened and almost over-sensitive man, 
who, so to speak, knows everything, has 
been called upon to live in the midst of a 

116 



Leo Tolstoy 

society which, by its conditions, presents 
an unbroken contradiction to all his as- 
pirations. The Russia of to-day cannot 
make use of men of Tolstoy's humanity 
and daring. Such men cannot work out 
in a free and healthy political life the glori- 
ous fires which are raging within them. 
They must in some way smother those fires. 
Therefore it is that of the men in Russia 
who have Tolstoy's humanity, some try to 
give up thinking about the state of their 
country ; some, after a youthful plunge 
into revolutions, become case-hardened and 
sink into tame heads of households ; some 
curse and emigrate, some commit suicide, 
some go mad. Despair has in various 
ways penetrated all. Some take to art, to 
literature, piano-playing, so that to-day the 
only great novelists, the only great exec- 
utants are Slavs. We listen to their weird, 
rebellious music ; we read their tales, so 
terrible in their melancholy ; but it may be 
hidden from us that these men who write 
books and play to preserve their self-re- 

117 



Leo Tolstoy 

spect, to claim in the world a place denied 
them in their own country, or to keep their 
hearts from breaking. They write or play 
for the same reason as the Pilgrim Fathers 
had to emigrate in England's bad days. 
In art, in anarchism, in suicide the humane 
and enlightened Russian emigrates from a 
land which, nevertheless, he loves with a 
passion which perhaps we, who are of a 
cooler breed, have lost the power to un 
derstand. 

In one of Maxim Gorki's stories the 
hero, after a wild life, comes to himself. 
For the first time, and too late for him, his 
eyes open to the general situation. He 
sees his pathetic fellowmen, their unending 
toils, the unrelieved drab and grey, like mud, 
of their surroundings, and the fire burns 
within him, the fire of indignation but of 
hope also, if all men will only see.. He be- 
gins a crusade against things as they are, 
appealing to men of his own class, to mer- 
chants and employers of labour. But he 
feels that he only irritates them. As he per- 

118 



Leo Tolstoy 

sists they become more openly hostile, or 
they simply laugh at him. The last stage in 
his despair is reached when he sees men 
whispering together as though planning 
something with regard to him, and it comes 
home to him that these men are proposing to 
deal with him as a maniac. — that is, to lock 
him up. 

As the utter hoplessness of ever being 
able to do anything strikes him anew, the 
poor man, mad in fact, lowers his head, and, 
rushing with a wild cry down a steep 
street, dashes out his brains against a stone 
wall at the foot of it ! In modern Russia, 
a thinking, unspoiled man, who has still the 
warm, simple heart of the Russian, must 
either knock his brains out (one way or 
another) or follow Tolstoy and believe in 
God. 

The other set of circumstances which 
make Tolstoy profoundly different from the 
notable Pilgrims of the Spirit, whose names 
have been before us, is that Tolstoy is a 
Russian, that the abiding soul of Russia 

119 



Leo Tolstoy 

labours and comes to self-consciousness 
in him. In this country we are at a disad- 
vantage when we speak of the Russian. 
There is a subtle but obstinate hostility to 
be overcome within us. But such a feeling 
is due not to the real Russian, whom I am 
quite sure we should very much love if we 
knew him, and considered him in his almost 
divine patience. It has been provoked by 
what we read in newspapers about the 
sayings or doings of certain people at the 
top in Russia. But I would not go to those 
at the top — to the rulers, to the generals, 
to the diplomatists — for my knowledge of 
a people. They, through no fault of their 
own, are very much alike in all nations. 
No ! I would go to the literature of the 
people, especially would I go to their lit- 
erature of the soul — the things they say or 
sing or write when their heart and flesh cry 
out. For myself, I have little interest in 
the Russia, which, according to report, is 
always engaged upon some sinister diplo- 
macy. The Russia I care for I find in 

1 20 



Leo Tolstoy 

Turgenieff and Tolstoy, in Merejkowsky, 
in Siebenkiewickz and what I find there 
is the great tender soul of a man who in 
simplicity, in directness, in his laughter 
and tears, is still a child. A virgin-soul it is 
still in touch with primitive nature, still de- 
riving nourishment for his spirit from the 
mystery and magnitude of things; still 
haunted by God, unable yet to think of life 
as void of a momentous and eternal mean- 
ing. A child it is indeed, summoned, it 
may be, too suddenly to the tasks of man- 
hood. Thus he stands puzzled on the 
threshold of baffling things, ready for any 
sincere comradeship. And when some 
hope, as is the way with children, fails him, 
he will break something that is near, or he 
will cover his face with his hands and weep, 
as though a quite infinite sorrow had be- 
fallen him. Tolstoy belongs to this young 
and primitive race, having its directness, 
its capacity for feeling in an extreme and 
infinite way the moods that visit us, the 
play of lights and shadows as we journey 

121 



Leo Tolstoy 

on. For "In Russia," it has been ob- 
served, "life runs to passion, to emotion, 
as in Greece it ran to intelligence, and 
with ourselves to action or practical mat- 
ters." "Every Russian who has not been 
demoralized by commerce or officialism is 
a Pilgrim. He is a foredoomed Truth- 
seeker." It may well be that Russia is des- 
tined to be the Messiah of modern nations, 
alone fitted to baptize the Western world 
anew into emotion, into simplicity, into a 
genuine communion with God. All that 
is in Tolstoy. 

And now, to proceed on our particular 
task, which is to define and follow the 
course of Tolstoy's personal and interior 
life, from the time when, leaving the clear 
pool amongst the hills, it fell wildly and 
painfully through dark and tortuous places 
until nearer the sea it has come to a space 
of fruitful peace. It is almost the whole 
truth to say that Tolstoy has written about 
nothing except his own interior history. 
Everything with him comes round to the 

122 



Leo Tolstoy 

soul, and is to be apprehended in terms ot 
feeling. He is present in all his works of 
fiction. Oleninein "The Cossacks," Levin 
in "Anna Karenina," Pierre and Andrei 
in "War and Peace," Nekhludoff in "Res- 
urrection" — they are all of them Tolstoy 
in various stages of his spiritual journey, 
Tolstoy in various moods — in the twilight 
of disillusionment, in the night of some 
despair, or in the glorious morning when 
he sings and makes melody in his heart. 
In addition, Tolstoy has put upon record 
in language which has no parallel for firm- 
ness, directness, unfaltering truthfulness, 
the story of his spiritual history as he 
recalled it. He has laid bare all his proc- 
esses ; he has kept nothing back ; the re- 
sult being- books which must have the value 
for all time of S. Augustine's "Confes- 
sions." I propose to make very extensive 
quotations from these autobiographies, in 
fact to make Tolstoy tell his own story. 
For one thing, no one could tell it with 
such discriminating language, with such 

123 



Leo Tolstoy 

correspondence of words to things of the 
soul, as Tolstoy. And it may be that I have 
justification for using freely his own record 
of his pilgrimage in this, that I have faithfully 
gone over all the ground with Tolstoy, that 
I have made the long detour of all his char- 
acteristic works, of which his autobiography 
is but the inner and concentric circle. 

Tolstoy was christened and educated 
in the faifh of the Orthodox Greek Church ; 
he was taught it as a child and as a youth. 
Nevertheless, at eighteen years of age, 
when he left the University of Kazan, he 
had given up all belief in anything he had 
ever been taught. He recalls how, when 
he was about twelve, a boy probably older 
than himself informed him airily that know- 
ing people, professors, and writers of books, 
had made the discovery that there was no 
God. At that time he enjoyed the jokes 
of older people when they ridiculed his 
brother for his seriousness. He read Vol- 
taire, permitting the Frenchman's mockery 

124 



Leo Tolstoy 

to poison his first fresh sense of things. 
The sum of it all was that at eighteen, so 
far as the traditional faith was concerned, 
the faith which he learned from the cate- 
chism and the schoolmaster, he had none. 
He showed his early interest in his own 
feelings by making the observation that 
although he had abandoned his hereditary 
faith, the absence of it did not seem to 
make any difference to him ; and he went 
on to conclude that every other person was 
exactly in the same position as he himself 
was. He looked about him and saw that 
the hereditary faith which people were sup- 
posed to hold, really and as a matter of 
fact had no influence upon their lives. He 
saw that there was no difference between 
people who professed the national religion 
and those who did not, or if there was any 
difference it was to the credit of those who 
had frankly discarded religion. He as- 
sumed, judging of others from his own 
case, that the hereditary religion meant 
nothing at all to anybody, that it continued 

125 



Leo Tolstoy 

to sit upon a great many people not be- 
cause they clung to it or felt their need of 
it, but simply because it had not yet been 
pushed from off them. A friend told him 
a story about himself which seemed to cor- 
roborate this view. He told Tolstoy how, 
"twenty-six years before, he was with a 
hunting party, and before he lay down to 
rest he knelt down to pray, according to a 
habit of his from childhood. His elder 
brother, who was of the party, lay on some 
straw and watched him. When the younger 
had finished, and was preparing to lie down, 
his brother said to him : 'Ah, you still keep 
that up ?' " Nothing more passed between 
them, but from that day the younger man 
ceased to pray and to go to Church. For 
nearly thirty years he has not said a prayer, 
has not taken the Communion, has not 
been in a church, not because he shared 
the convictions of his brother, not because 
he had come to conclusions of his own, but 
because his brother's words were like the 
push of a finger against a wall ready to 

126 



Leo Tolstoy 

tumble over with its own weight; they 
proved to him that what he had taken for 
belief was an empty form, and that conse- 
quently every word he uttered, every sign 
of the cross he made, every time he bowed 
his head during his prayers, his act was an 
unmeaning one. When he once admitted 
to himself that such acts had no meaning 
in them, he could not but discontinue them. 
"Thus," concludes Tolstoy, "it has been, 
and is, I believe, with the large majority 
of men." 

Tolstoy entered upon his manhood, hav- 
ing left for ever behind him, as he thought, 
the traditional religion, assuming too that 
most of the people round about him, as a 
matter of fact, were in the same position. 
There is, however, a wide gulf between 
Tolstoy and the average careless person. 
He was conscious that he had abandoned 
the old faith. It was, as we shall see, the 
void left within him by the removal of the 
old pieties and sanctions for life, which 
became in his case the seat, first of his 

127 



Leo Tolstoy 

spiritual misery, and at last the beginning 
of his hope. He entered manhood free 
from dogmatic bondage, but at the same 
time with a more or less active belief in 
God, or rather a kind of feeling for God. 
He joined the army, and fought in the de- 
fence of Sevastopol. There he began to 
write, and at one became famous. Already 
to discriminating minds in these first tales 
from Sevastopol, Tolstoy can not hide the 
outlines of his spirit. He can not keep 
back the cries, the yearnings, the protests, 
the shrinkings which he was afterwards to 
utter without ceasing. Although he had to 
be careful of the censor, already in these 
first sketches war becomes hideous, insane, 
immoral ; generals and captains appear as 
helpless and futile beings who, in the actual 
stress of things, can do nothing at all. 
Already, too, the one figure who catches 
Tolstoy's eye and brings the sense of tears 
into his pen, is the figure of the obscure 
and unregarded common soldier, with his 
dumb fidelity like a dog, with his inex- 

128 



Leo Tolstoy 

haustible patience. "I can not/' says Tol- 
stoy, "now recall those years without a 
painful feeling of horror and loathing. I 
put men to death, I fought duels to slay 
others, I lost at cards, wasted the substance 
wrung from the sweat of peasants, rioted, 
and deceived. Lying, robbery, adultery of 
all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder, 
all committed by me, not one crime omitted, 
and yet I was not the less considered by 
my equals a comparatively moral man. 
Such was my life during ten years. During 
that time I began to write, out of vanity, 
love of gain, and pride. I followed as a 
writer the same path which I had chosen 
as a man. In order to obtain the fame and 
the money for which I wrote, I was obliged 
to hide what was good, and bow down 
before what was evil. How often while 
writing have I cudgelled my brains to con- 
ceal under the mask of indifference or 
pleasantry those yearnings for something 
better which formed the real problem of 
my life ! I succeeded in my object and was 

9 129 



Leo Tolstoy 

praised. . . . Before I had time to look 
around, the prejudices and views of life 
common to the writers of the class with 
which I associated became my own, and 
completely put an end to all my former 
struggles after a better life. These views, 
under the influence of the dissipation into 
which I plunged, issued in a theory of life 
which justified it. The view taken by my 
fellow-writers was that life is a develop- 
ment, and the principal part in that devel- 
opment is played by ourselves, the thinkers , 
while among the thinkers, the chief influence 
is again due to ourselves, the poets. Our 
vocation is to teach mankind. It ought 
next to have occurred to serious men who 
were engaged in teaching their fellow-men, 
to ask themselves, 'What is it that we are 
teaching!' or, 'Are we teaching anything?' 
or, 'Is what we are teaching right?' " And 
these questions did haunt Tolstoy in a very 
troublesome way. But he succeeded for a 
time in putting them aside. He was be- 
coming rich, he was famous, he wrote on 

130 



Leo Tolstoy 

and on, as did others. "We were all then 
convinced that it behoved us to speak, to 
write, to print as fast as we could, as much 
as we could, and that on this depended 
the welfare of the human race. Hundreds 
of us wrote, printed, taught, and all the 
while confuted and abused each other. 
Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew 
nothing, that to the simplest of all problems 
in life — what is right and what is wrong — 
we had no answer, we all went on talking 
together, without one to listen, at times 
abetting and praising one another on con- 
dition that we were abetted and praised in 
turn, and again turning upon each other in 
wrath — in short, we reproduced the scenes 
in a madhouse." 

To a nature like Tolstoy's, once a 
question has been raised there is no peace 
until somehow it is dealt with and composed. 
At this stage his difficulty, by his own ac- 
count, was that he had become a leader, a 
guide, a teacher, while the fact was he had 
no message to declare to men, no light 

131 



Leo Tolstoy 

upon life, no clue to its mystery. During 
the six years previous to his marriage his 
mind became so engaged with his personal 
problem that for a time he withdrew to the 
steppes, to recover under the healing influ- 
ences of nature his equanimity. By this 
time he had travelled in Europe, taking 
every opportunity to acquaint himself with 
the best thought of his time. It seemed 
to him that he found a foundation for his 
life in the ideas of progress and develop- 
ment which were current. He was so 
eager to embrace any positive faith with 
regard to the meaning of life, that he tried 
to put away from himself some difficulties 
which his quick mind detected in all the 
talk about progress as a moral aim or mo- 
tive for man. He felt that men who had, 
on their own confession, no confidence at 
all in life, no conviction as to the " whither 
of all things," were ill-prepared to order 
the immediate steps. The gospel of prog- 
ress seemed to him to be nothing better 
than a kind of fatalism with no right or 

J 3 2 



Leo Tolstoy 

qualification to answer the question which 
was gnawing within him. " Tormented by 
the question, 'How was I to better my 
life?' — when I answered that I must live 
for progress, I was only repeating the an- 
swer of a man carried away in a boat by 
the waves and the wind, who, to the one 
important question for him, * Where are 
we to steer?' should answer, saying, 'We 
are being carried somewhere.' " Two 
events he records as happening at this 
time, the influence of one and the other 
being to show him the hollowness for the 
individual of any support for faith in hazy 
notions of universal progress. While in 
Paris, he saw a man guillotined, and on 
his return to Russia he was summoned to 
the deathbed of a very dear brother. With 
regard to the incident in Paris, he tells us 
that as he saw the head divided from the 
body ... he understood, not with his 
reason, but with his whole being (a favorite 
phrase of Tolstoy's), that no theory of the 
wisdom of all established things, nor of 

133 



Leo Tolstoy 

progress, could justify such an act ; and 
that if all the men in the world from 
the day of creation, by whatever theory, 
had found this thing necessary, it was not 
so. It was a bad thing. Therefore he 
must judge of what was right and neces- 
sary, not by what men said and did, not by 
"progress," but by what he himself felt to 
be true in his own heart. As for the effect 
upon him of his brother s death, a young, 
sincere, and able man, who died without 
ever having known what his life had been 
given him for, this was all that was needed 
to give the terrible fact of death its supreme 
place for Tolstoy amongst the difficulties 
which life raises in the way of faith. As he 
beheld his brother dying, he could only 
feel the irony under the consolations of 
"progress." "What boots it," as Lotze 
says, "that life on the whole is well, if in 
its details it is terrible !" 

Hoping, it may be, to keep off the in- 
sistence of his own questioning spirit, Tol- 
stoy, on his return home, devoted himself 

134 



Leo Tolstoy 

to teaching. He also accepted a magis- 
tracy, and busied himself in affairs. But 
the inner ferment never at any time sub- 
sided, and at last, his health threatening 
to break down seriously, he betook himself 
as we have said, to the steppes. There he 
enjoyed a certain leisure from himself, and 
wrote his charming story, "The Cossacks." 
Let me quote a few lines, which, to discern- 
ing eyes, will show at least the promise of 
daybreak in the soul of Tolstoy. "The 
hero, Olenine, has gone out pheasant shoot- 
ing alone. He lies down in a thicket where 
a deer had lain before him and had left the 
imprint of his body on the leaves. He is 
suddenly seized by an unutterable sensa- 
tion of happiness, of love for all creation. 
The very gnats that annoyed him at first 
began to have a claim upon him as part of 
the whole situation. He makes the sign 
of the cross and murmurs a prayer. ' Why 
have I never been happy?' he asks. He 
reviews his life and turns in disgust from 
its unredeemed selfishness. Suddenly a 

135 



Leo Tolstoy 

light breaks upon him. 'Happiness,' he 
cried, ' consists in living for others ; that is 
clear. Man aspires to happiness ; there- 
fore it is a proper desire. If he tries to get 
it in a selfish way, in seeking wealth, glory, 
love, he may not succeed, and his wishes 
remain unsatisfied. Then it must be selfish 
desires which are wrong, and not the wish 
to be happy. Now, what are the dreams 
which may be realised apart from our out- 
ward circumstances? Only love and self- 
sacrifice!' He jumps up, rejoicing in his 
discovery, and seeks impatiently for some 
one to love, to do good to, to deny himself 
for. And returning to the village, he in- 
sists upon presenting his horse to a young 
Cossack who had been his rival in the 
affections of one of the village maidens. 
He loved every one so much that he felt 
that his remote hamlet was his true home, 
that there was his family and his happiness, 
that nowhere else and never again could he 
be so full of joy." 1 

x Crosley's " Message of Tolstoy." 



Leo Tolstoy 

On his return from the steppes he mar- 
ried the delightful "Kitty" of Anna Kare- 
nina. For fifteen years the responsibilities, 
the joys of family life, his bodily vigour, 
daily labours, his increasing power and fame 
as a writer — these succeeded in keeping at 
least within bounds the old question, the old 
cry for light upon this life of ours, for faith, 
for confidence as to life's meaning. But now 
it returned to him with redoubled energy. 
The question since his brother's death 
came now before him rather than in this 
way: "What is that meaning of life which 
takes the sting and bitterness from death?" 

He began to wander about the fields, 
and was a victim of low spirits. The 
same questions kept sounding in his ears, 
"Why?" and "What after?" At first it 
seemed to him that these were empty and 
unmeaning questions; that the answers 
were well known, and such as he could 
adopt, whenever he cared to take the 
trouble. But they presented themselves 
to his mind with ever-increasing frequency, 



Leo Tolstoy 

demanding an answer with greater and 
greater persistence, grouping themselves 
into one dark and ominous spot. It was 
with him, he says, as in every case of a 
hidden, mortal disease; at first the symp- 
toms are slight, and are disregarded by the 
patient, but later they are repeated more 
and more frequently, till they end in a 
period of uninterrupted suffering. The 
sufferings increase, and the patient, before 
he has time to seek a remedy, is confronted 
with the fact that what he took for a mere 
indisposition has become more important 
to him than anything else on earth, that he 
is face to face with death. He had thoughts 
of taking his own life, and for a time would 
not handle a gun for fear of what he might 
do in an access of despondency ; and yet 
his mind was perfectly clear. He had a 
loving and beloved wife, a happy home of 
children, and as for his bodily vigour, he 
could keep up with a peasant in mowing. 
He sums up his condition in a story, which 
once heard can never be forgotten. "There 

138 



Leo Tolstoy 

is an old Eastern fable about a traveller in 
the Steppes who is attacked by a furious 
wild beast. To save himself the traveller 
gets into a dried-up well, but at the bottom 
of it he sees a dragon with its jaws wide 
open to devour him. The unhappy man 
dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, 
and dares not descend for fear of the 
dragon, so he catches hold of the branch 
of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the 
well. His arms grow tired, and he feels 
that he must soon perish, death waiting 
him on either side, but he still holds on; 
and then he sees two mice, one black and 
one white, gnawing through the stem of 
the wild plant, as they gradually and evenly 
make their way round it. The plant must 
soon give way, break off, and he will fall 
into the jaws of the dragon. The traveller 
sees this, and knows that he must inevitably 
perish; but, while still hanging, he looks 
around him, and finding some drops of 
honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he 
stretches out his tongue and licks them." 

139 



Leo Tolstoy 

"Thus," continues Tolstoy, "I cling to 
the branch of life, knowing that the dragon 
of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear 
me to oieces, and I can not understand 
why such tortures are fallen to my lot. I 
also strive to suck the honey which once 
comforted me, but it palls on my palate, 
while the white mouse and the black, day 
and night, gnaw through the branch to 
which I cling. I see the dragon too 
plainly, and the honey is no longer sweet. 
I see the dragon, from whom there is no 
escape, and the mice, and I can not turn 
my eyes away from them. It is no fable, 
but a living, undeniable truth, to be un- 
derstood of all men. The former delusion 
of happiness in life, which hid from me 
the horror of the dragon, no longer de- 
ceives me. However I may reason with 
myself that I can not understand the 
meaning of life, that I must live without 
thinking, I can not again begin to do so, 
because I have done so too long already. 
I can not now help seeing that each day 

140 



Leo Tolstoy 

and each night as it passes brings me 
nearer to death." 

Here, then, Tolstoy came to a standstill, 
here where all the elect souls have stood. 
The question could not now be postponed 
or evaded. He felt he could not live with 
self-respect, with integrity, until the ques- 
tion had received some final and irrevoca- 
ble solution and the question had come to 
be this : ''Is there any meaning in my life 
which can overcome the inevitable death 
awaiting me?" 

He searched the science of our time, 
its philosophy, its practical wisdom, for a 
solution, for an anodyne even, to this inner 
torment ; but in each case turned away 
disheartened, repelled. Tolstoy revels in 
his contempt for science the moment it 
presumes to deal with what for him were 
the really important things, namely, the 
whence, the why, and the whither of life ? 

"For the practical side of life, I used 
to say to myself, all its development and 
differentiation, all tends to complication 

141 



Leo Tolstoy 

and perfection, and there are laws which 
govern this process. You are yourself a 
part of the whole. Learn as much as pos- 
sible of the whole, and learn the law of its 
development : you will then know your 
own place in the great unity. Though I 
feel shame in confessing it, I must needs 
own that there was a time when I was my- 
self developing, when my muscles and 
memory were strengthening, my power of 
thinking and understanding on the increase ; 
that I, feeling' this, very naturally thought 
that the law of my own growth was the law 
of the universe, and explained the meaning 
of my own life. But there came another 
time when I had ceased to grow, when I 
felt that I was no longer developing, but 
drying up. My muscles grew weaker, my 
teeth began to fall out ; and I saw that this 
law of growth not only explained nothing, 
but that such a law did not and could not 
exist; that I had taken for a general law 
what only affected myself at a given age." 
Again "the relation of experimental sci- 

142 



Leo Tolstoy 

ence to the question of the meaning of life, 
may be put as follows : Question, * Why do 
I live ?' Answer, ' Infinitely small particles 
in infinite combinations, in endless space 
and endless time, eternally change their 
forms ; and when you have learned the laws 
of these changes, you will know why you 
live.' " In short, when science presumes to 
deal with causes, with the final cause, with 
reality in fact, it begins to talk nonsense. 

Tolstoy is led to ask himself at this 
point how it comes to pass that the people 
round about him are not aware of the 
problem which is haunting him like a night- 
mare ; and he explains to himself why they 
are at ease, or seem to be. People of his 
own class, the cultured, the intellectual, 
save themselves from the terrible contra- 
diction between faith and life as we know 
it, and take part in it, in four different 
ways. " One way is to ignore life's being 
a meaningless jumble of vanity and evil; 
not to know that it is better not to live. 
For me not to know this was impossible, 

143 



Leo Tolstoy 

and when I once saw the truth I could not 
shut my eyes to it. Another way is to 
make the best of life as it is, without think- 
ing- of the future. This again I could not 
do. I, like Sakya Muni, could not drive 
to the pleasure ground when I knew of the 
existence of old age, suffering and death. 
My imagination was too lively for that. 
Moreover, my heart was ungladdened by 
the passing joys which fell for a few rare 
instants to my lot. The third way is, 
knowing that life is an evil and a foolish 
thing, to put an end to it, to kill oneself. 
I understood this, but did not kill myself. 
The fourth is to accept life, as described 
by Solomon and Schopenhauer, to know 
that it is a stupid and ridiculous joke, and 
yet live on, to wash, dress, dine, talk, and 
even write books. This position was pain- 
ful and disgusting to me, but I remained 
in it." 

And now having reached with Tolstoy 
this lonely place from which he looks 
across the dark and senseless waters of an 

J 44 



Leo Tolstoy 

infinite sea, let us — and it is a much pleas- 
anter task, though not more valuable for 
ourselves — (let us) make plain to ourselves 
what considerations led him away from the 
dizzy brink and brought him back into the 
warm circle of our common life. I have 
said that he stood upon the last shelf of 
things looking out into the blankness. 
Well, it is only the truth to say that his first 
step back from that place was taken when 
he turned his face and began to look back 
into life. For the solution of life must be 
found, and is found, within life itself — 
though the saving clue may be very deep 
and very fugitive and obscure. We saw, 
a moment ago, that Tolstoy admitted that 
there was one way of getting out of the dif- 
ficulty, out of the contradiction between life 
and faith, or rather between life and reason. 
He could put an end to his life, but the 
fact is, he went on living. Why was that ? 
We have his word for it that it was not 
cowardice. It was not that he was re- 
strained by thinking of his family. No, he 

10 145 



Leo Tolstoy 

tells us, it was because that course seemed 
wrong and impossible for him. The same 

force of reason which made him dissatisfied 
with every theory of life urged him never- 
theless to keep in life. To put the same 
thing in another way. It did seem that no 
quite reasonable defence of life could be 
given. You could not say "this" or 
"that" is the meaning of life, and it is a 
meaning which is not destroyed by death. 
And yet, there were — to quote Pascal — 
reasons, it would appear, beyond reason. 
There was the instinct to live, which, to 
say no more, was as truly part of man's 
nature as those powers of reasoning which 
had up to this point brought him all his 
trouble. Reason — the intellectual faculty, 
the critical faculty — had its place, and must 
not be denied; but there was something 
deeper. There was life itself, of which 
reason was but a late fruit. There was this 
ineradicable instinct with its claims, its in- 
sistence, the instinct to live ; and looking into 
the heart of that instinct, he saw that it was 

146 



Leo Tolstoy 

itself a kind of faith. The instinct to live 
was but the unconscious belief with which 
every man was endowed, that somehow 
life — and it followed a full true life — is pos- 
sible, and therefore is demanded by the 
Author of our being. This result, though 
it may be stated thus briefly, became clear 
to Tolstoy first in glorious moments of 
insight, of self-surrender, and only after- 
wards became the ground-work of his con- 
vinced and logical doctrine of life. But 
my point is that his face is now turned the 
other way, turned home, turned towards 
the reconciliation, however remote he may 
still be from perfect intellectual satisfaction. 
You see how the controversy is progess- 
ing within him, and how daybreak is already 
in the sky for him in a quotation from 
Anna Karenina: "'In the infinitude of 
time, of matter, of space, an organic cell is 
formed, exists for a moment, and bursts. 
That cell is I.' This was a gloomy sophism. 
He saw in it the cruel jest of some evil 
spirit. And Levin, the happy father of a 

147 



Leo Tolstoy 

family, a man in perfect health, was some- 
times so tempted to commit suicide, that he 
hid ropes from sight lest he should hang him- 
self, and feared to go out with his gun lest he 
should shoot himself.' ' But so long as he 
pursues the old energetic life y he feels that 
he is useful and happy. And when, in the 
field one day, an old Mujik tells him of a 
certain " honest man" who "lives for the 
Soul and remembers God," these simple, 
old-fashioned words have an extraordinary 
effect upon him — "the effect of an electric 
spark suddenly condensing the clouds of 
dim, incoherent thoughts" — so that "he felt 
that some new impulse inexplicable as yet 
filled his heart with joy." Now, the faith 
that Tolstoy was in search of, was not 
something which would save him the 
troubles and penalties of thought. And it 
was not something which would justify him 
in being morally idle, like those who say 
"God's in His heaven, all's right with the 
world" — and themselves do nothing. The 
faith which Tolstoy was seeking was, such 

148 



Leo Tolstoy 

a way of looking at things as would sup- 
port and justify him in consecrating and 
quickening and bringing to their fulfilment 
''those ancient, instinctive, vital currents 
that hold the goodness of the race and 
carry it on from age to age." Tolstoy 
came into faith, when he accepted as the 
habit of his mind, as the law of his nature, 
that inner blessedness which so far had 
come to him only in moments, only in 
flashes. He remembered that those mo- 
ments, those flashes of inner blessedness 
had come to him always when he was done 
with self-seeking; always when he had 
given up the life of worrying thought ; al- 
ways when he had taken life for granted; 
always when he yielded himself to a pro- 
found current of generosity, of human ten- 
derness, of brotherhood which was there, as 
much there as this more superficial faculty of 
reason. An d it at last came home to him that 
a man has faith, has a personal and uncon- 
querable belief, has at length a hold upon 
the true meaning of life, who regards it as 

149 



Leo Tolstoy 

his one duty, and the very reason for his 
existence, to keep his own soul at the 
angle of love, at that angle which catches 
and reflects a certain profound and unut- 
terable joy. "Faith is love in a common 
life." 

He saw that all our intellectual misery 
raises from us men trying to do what is 
none of our business, namely, to discover 
the origin of life. Our business is only 
with duties, with obedience, with our own 
passage and striving from evil to good. The 
men who bother themselves about the origin 
of life, when they ought to be concerned with 
its aim, Tolstoy likens to a "miller who, con- 
cluding that all the success or failure of his 
mill depends upon the river, allows the 
machinery to go to pieces, and notwith- 
standing the counsel of his neighbors, at 
last persuades himself that the river is the 
milir 

Another mistake which, as Tolstoy now 
saw he had been making, was that he had 
been asking the meaning of life from men 

150 



Leo Tolstoy 

who, like himself, did not know it. That was 
as reasonable as it would be to go amongst 
invalids, asking first one and then another, 
the secret of health. If he wanted to 
know the meaning of life, the proper course 
for him was to consult that body of the peo- 
ple in whom, up to this point, the unity of 
the soul has been maintained ; those peo- 
ple who still live by an elementary principle 
of life, an instinctive consciousness which 
they do not ask to have explained to them, 
that life itself, with all it holds, is good, is 
right. 

He went to the peasantry, to those 
who create life, and their life appeared to 
him in its true significance. "I under- 
stood that this was life itself — this namely, 
labour, brotherhood — and that the mean- 
ing given to this life was a true one, and 
I accepted it." 

"The more I studied the lives and doc- 
trines of the people, the more I became 
convinced that a true faith was among 
them, that their faith was for them a neces- 

151 



Ley Tolstoy 

sary thing, and alone gave them a meaning 
in life and a possibility of living. In direct 
opposition to what I saw in my own circle 
— the possibility of living without faith, and 
not one in a thousand who professed him- 
self a believer — amongst the people there 
was not amongst thousands a single un- 
believer. In direct opposition to what I 
saw in my circle — a whole life spent in 
idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction 
with life — I saw among the people whole 
lives passed in heavy labour and unrepining 
content. In direct opposition to what I 
saw in my own circle — men resisting, and 
indignant with the privations and sufferings 
of their lot — the people unhesitatingly and 
unresistingly accepting illness and sorrow, 
in the quiet and firm conviction that all 
was for the best. In contradiction to the 
theory that the less learned we are the less 
we understand the meaning of life, and see 
in our sufferings and death but an evil 
joke — those men of the people live, suffer, 
and draw near to death, in quiet confidence 

152 



Leo Tolstoy 

and oftenest with joy. In contradiction to 
the fact that an easy death without terror 
or despair, is a rare exception in my own 
class — a death which is uneasy, rebellious, 
and sorrowful, is among the people the 
rarest exception of all. These men, de- 
prived of all that for us and for Solomon, 
makes the only good in life, experience the 
highest happiness both in amount and 
kind. I looked more carefully and more 
widely around me, I studied the lives of 
the past and contemporary masses of hu- 
manity, and I saw that not two or three, 
not ten or a hundred, but thousands and 
millions had so understood the meaning of 
life, that they were both able to live and 
to die. All these men, infinitely divided by 
manners, powers of mind, education, and 
position, all alike in opposition to my ig- 
norance, were well acquainted with the 
meaning of life and of death, quietly la- 
boured on and endured privation and suf- 
fering, lived and died, and saw in all this 
not a vain, but a good thing.' ' 

153 



Leo Tolstoy 

My task is done : for in the Kingdom 
of the Spirit a man is already home whose 
face is turned homewards. From this 
point, Tolstoy goes forward with an in- 
creasing positiveness. He never again 
felt a shudder of the old misgiving, of the 
last misgiving. Once for all he had decided 
that for him at least life was simply not 
possible without faith. And by the logic 
of the heart he moved up to that position 
which Pater, by a curiously similar process, 
attained: that since there are certain pre- 
suppositions, postulates, beliefs, without 
which a man simply cannot live, is not 
this a presumption that these presupposi 
tions, postulates, beliefs, do signify the 
permanent universal truth? "I had only 
to know God, and I lived : I had only to for- 
get Him, not to believe in Him, and I 
died. What was this discouragement and 
revival ? I do not live when I lose faith in 
the existence of a God ; I should long ago 
have killed myself if I had not had a dim 
hope of finding Him. I only really live 

154 



Leo Tolstoy 

when I feel, and seek Him. What more 
then do I ask ? And a voice seemed to 
cry within me, 'This is He, He without 
whom there is no life ! To know God and 
to live are One. God is Life. Live to 
seek God and life will not be without 
Him/ And stronger than ever rose up life 
within me and around me, and the light 
that then shone never left me again." 

The last written words of Tolstoy, to 
which I have access, very fittingly conclude 
this sketch of his spiritual career. He is 
dealing with the great human fact of 
Death, which, as we have seen, was wont 
to loom so bodingly through all his 
thoughts, numbing all his energies in a 
certain heart-sickness. Observe what a 
tame creature Death is to him now. 

" Man cannot, while living in this world 
in a bodily form, picture life to himself 
otherwise than in space and time ; he there- 
fore naturally asks, where he will be after 
death ? But this question is wrongly put. 
When the divine essence of the soul which 

155 



Leo Tolstoy 

is spiritual, independent of time and space, 
enclosed in the body in this life — when this 
divine essence leaves the body it ceases to 
be conditioned by time or space, and there- 
fore one cannot say of this essence that it 
will be. It is. As Christ said : ' Before 
Abraham was, I am ; so also with us all. If 
we are, we always have been, and shall be. 
We are . . . Human reason, which can 
work only in the conditions of time and 
space, cannot give an answer concerning 
that which is outside these conditions. One 
thing only is known to reason : that the 
divine essence does exist, that it has been 
growing while in this world, and that, hav- 
ing attained a certain extent of growth, it 
has passed out of these conditions. Will 
this essence still continue its functions in 
a separate form ? Will the increase of 
love produce a new accumulation ? These 
are but conjectures, and of such conjec- 
tures there may be many ; but none of 
them can give certainty. One thing alone 
is certain and indisputable, that which 

156 



Leo Tolstoy 

Christ said when He was dying : ' Father, 
into Thy hands I commit My spirit/ That 
is to say, at death I return whence I came. 
And if I believe that from which I have em- 
anated, to be reason and love (and these 
two realities I know), then I shall joyously 
return to Him, knowing that it will be well 
with me. Not only have I no regret, but 
I rejoice at the thought of the passage 
which awaits me." 



157 



John Henry Newman 



■ * If the Lord were pleased to kill us, He would not have 
received a burnt offering and a meat offering at our hand, neither 
would He have shewed us all these things, nor would at this 
time have told such things as these." — The Book of Judges 

"Are ye so foolish? having begun in the spirit do ye now 
make an end in the flesh ? — St. Paul to the Galatians. 

i6o 



John Henry Newman 

It would be difficult to name another, 
who, by the force of his solitary genius 
and personality, has wrought such a change 
in the religious life of a country as has 
been effected by the life of John Henry 
Newman. It is the bare truth that his in- 
fluence upon the religious temper of Great 
Britain, notably upon England, indirectly 
upon all English-speaking peoples, is at 
this moment beyond all our powers of cal- 
culating. Not to speak of those, who in 
great numbers, have followed Newman 
into the Church of Rome, his ideas with 
regard to faith, with regard to the proper 
relations between faith and reason, with 
regard to the Church — those ideas have 
invaded the Church of England, which he 
left, and have now become the working 
basis of that Church. Since Newman's 
ii 161 



yohn Henry Newman 

day the Church of England has not been 
the same. Since his day the note has been 
changed; her face is turned another way 
— his way. Other churches have felt his 
influence to a less degree, but all have felt 
it, and are destined, it may be, to feel it still 
more powerfully, But wherever the em- 
phasis is laid upon the Church as an in- 
stitution, rather than upon the Kingdom of 
God as a Spirit, there Newman's teaching 
has found an opening, and, once in, has 
never been expelled. 

It will only be fair to myself to state 
here that whatever I may be led to say of 
Newman later on, it is in no case to be 
understood as casting doubt upon the 
character of the man, upon his sincerity, 
upon his anxious and scrupulous purpose 
to be loyal at each stage to what at that 
moment he conceived to be Jiis duty. 

So much of Newman's work is contro- 
versial, and the things he is contending for 
seem to men of a different temperament 
in many cases so unreal and so unprofit- 

162 



yohn Henry Newman 

able even when they are established, that 
we may easily forget the total contribution 
he has made to the spiritual substance of 
our time and of all time. 

Whatever we may think of Newman's 
mental history, whatever criticism and, at 
times impatience we may have for the 
reasons which he gives in justification of 
the various steps he took, and of the last 
step, we must never suspect the real hon- 
esty of the man — he being such as he was 
: — his exact obedience to what he conceived 
to be the will of God. It was an error 
here which proved fatal to Kingsley in his 
controversy with Newman. His charge 
against Newman of insincerity and lying 
should never have been made. Newman, 
in fact, lived under a light which would be 
intolerable to the majority of even very 
good men. Indeed, as has happened in 
the case of others, it was just this very 
sincerity of his, his exact obedience to his 
own restless sense of what was right, it 
was this which gave to his behaviour, as 

163 



yohn Henry Newman 

outsiders observed it, the appearance of 
shiftiness and planning and cowardice. 
For myself, if I needed any proof that 
Newman was entirely sincere with himself, 
that however tortuous and incalculable the 
way he took, his aim was always pure and 
purged of self-seeking, I should only have 
to read the writings he has left behind. 
No man could write English like Newman's 
English who was not himself a faithful man. 
No one could see so clearly and tell so dis- 
tinctly what he saw in the inmost recesses 
of the soul who was not in the habit of be- 
ing quite alone with himself and with God. 
It may be that, when all is said, we 
owe some grudges to Newman. It may 
be that he has hindered the real progress 
of the Kingdom of God, that he has re- 
tarded the recovery of man from supersti- 
tion, from a natural love of darkness. It 
is probably true that he has revived 
amongst us the spirit of bigotry, and — 
unless we had safeguards — of persecution, 
and thereby has compelled us and will 

164 



yohn Henry Newman 

compel our children to fight for principles 
which, as we thought, would never again 
be assailed. Perhaps he has encouraged 
all the churches to look backwards rather 
than forwards. Perhaps he has done much 
to make good men suspect their own best 
instincts, to curb unduly within themselves 
that daring- of the soul which has been the 
good providence of the world. Perhaps 
he has thrown open certain subterranean 
chambers, concerning which, God, who 
moves through history, ordains that once 
closed they shall remain closed. Perhaps 
he has taught us to remember "those 
things that are behind" which an apostle 
bids us " forget." Perhaps his whole in- 
tellectual fabric, his whole scheme of life, 
his premises and arguments, and his con- 
clusions, rest upon nothing better than 
that natural terror of our immense and un- 
fathomable surroundings, which our re- 
ligion, culminating as it does in Christ, 
was given to sanctify, it may be to banish, 
for ever. Perhaps Newman's entire sys- 

165 



yohn Henry Newman 

tern rests, when all is said, not upon revela- 
tion, but upon reason, upon reason working 
in holes and corners. Perhaps it all rests 
not upon the revelation of God, but upon 
his own terrible analysis of man, which 
way madness lies. Perhaps it has, as its 
root idea, not that faith in God to which 
Christ invites us, but a certain suspicion 
of God, a certain terror of what the Al- 
mighty might do to us if He were minded. 
It may be that all this is a true charge 
against Newman. Indeed, it was his boast 
that he had accomplished many of these 
things. And, so far, we blame him. 

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding all 
these things, there is that in Newman for 
which all good men will continue to give 
God thanks, and will be glad to lay a rev- 
erent stone upon his cairn. For one thing, 
Newman's life, simple and severe, unvexed 
by any low or unworthy aim, strung rather 
to the very breaking point by the immediate 
sense of God, was a shining protest against 
the easy and indolent, and almost patron- 

166 



■ / 



yohn Henry Newman 

izing attitude towards religion which satis- 
fied the great mass of people in his day. 
One sees a meaning in this man's coming 
into our midst. He lived altogether for 
God, in absolute surrender to what he be- 
lieved to be God's will. The secular spirit 
of his time, far from tempting him gave 
him pain. He was always simple, unaf- 
fected, austere. He never paraded his 
gifts, but rather in his private conversation, 
as in the pulpit and in his books, practised 
a certain reserve. " God and the human 
soul," as he again and again declared, 
were to him the only two realities. This 
was the impression which he made upon 
his contemporaries, and it is what we feel 
as we read what he has left behind. His 
sermons are models of simplicity, and of 
what was his constant aim — reality. There 
is nothing extravagant, nothing of colour 
or excess ; everywhere there is the atmos- 
phere of a high seriousness, of a certain 
aloofness from the world, which at times 
approaches contempt for it. 

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yohn Henry Newman 

Now that we have alluded to his ser- 
mons, perhaps we could not do better for 
our present purpose than consider them 
further, and through them make a definite 
entrance into the proper mind of Newman. 
The preaching of such a sensitive man 
was sure to be full of his own story. Hear- 
ing him preach, trained ears may hear 
him confess. 

Newman had many natural qualities 
which, penetrated as they were by the 
man's awful seriousness, and by his con- 
viction that what he said was true, made 
him a great preacher. He had a com- 
manding presence. He had not the face 
of a common man. It suggested to Froude, 
the historian, the features of Julius Caesar ; 
the same combination of seriousness and 
gentleness. 

It sometimes happens that when we 
meet a man in private whose writings we 
have read, or whom we have heard in 
public, we are disappointed in him, and 
nothing that the man may ever write or 

1 68 



yohn Henry Newman 

say afterwards will make him an impres- 
sive figure for us. It was not so in New- 
man's case. Men who were admitted to 
close quarters with Newman felt that he 
really possessed those reserves of intel- 
lectual and personal holiness which his 
spoken or written words had suggested 
to them. 

It may be that many of his most char- 
acteristic sermons do not impress us. We 
can convict him of special pleading and 
want of fairness towards views other than 
his own. But nothing could surpass, as 
an instrument for producing a keen im- 
pression upon selected minds, the severe 
and chastened speech, the insight, the 
grace, the allusiveness, the rage against sin, 
the fine scorn for average standards of life, 
the superiority to the ways and maxims 
of the world, which are the features of those 
sermons. But they have their defects. 
True as they are, they sin against the 
whole truth. 

In saying that, as I do very deliberately, 
169 



yohn Henry Newman 

I mean that whilst Newman knows the 
human heart to a weird and shaking depth, 
there are levels of the human heart which 
he either does not know or will not trust. 
He knows, almost too well, the souls 
of sinking and baffled men ; he does not 
know or will not trust the testimony of 
those whom God has made glad. He 
knows the soul in those hours when a man 
is confused, at a loss. He knows a man 
when — for one reason or another — his face 
is towards the darkness. I cannot imagine 
Newman joining himself to those women 
of Bedford, whom Bunyan found ''sitting 
at a door in the sun talking about the 
things of God. . . . Their talk was 
about a new birth . . . how God had 
visited their souls with love in the Lord 
Jesus, and with what words they had been 
refreshed, comforted, and supported against 
the temptations of the devil. . . . And 
methought they spake with such pleasant- 
ness of Scripture language, and with such 
appearance of grace in all they said that 

170 



yohn Henry Newman 

they were to me as if they had found a 
new world. . . ." 

The atmosphere which surrounds New- 
man is so different in quality from that, 
that it is only a firm way of stating the 
difference to ask whether Newman or Bun- 
yan believed ultimately in the same God ! 

Newman knows the human soul, but 
for the most part only on its dark and 
troubled side. He knows it in its varied dis- 
asters, in the hours when mere knowledge 
fails, when the things in which he trusted 
mock a man. Indeed there is in all New- 
man's preaching a kind of mocking at man. 

To describe this atmosphere which in- 
fects his preaching from another point of 
view ; he never uplifts you. He suspects 
all the kindly humanities. He knows your 
secret, rather than God's secret for you. 
He knows you and yet with a certain in- 
justice. He does not know you at your 
best. He knows how to corner you, how 
to crush you, how to expose you. He will 
not give you the benefit of the doubt. His 

171 



yohn Henry Newman 

words do not, speaking properly, humble 
you ; for when we are humble we are ready 
to believe ; his words humiliate you ; and 
when we are humiliated we are ready to 
despair, to plunge into any abyss. 

The one proper effect of all Newman's 
preaching seems to me this, to make men 
feel insecure, to make them confused, at a 
loss, desperate, ready to give themselves 
over to a certain slavish panic to some au- 
thority which could hardly be anything else 
except visible and external and self-con- 
tained. There is no logical course for the 
man who wrote Newman's Anglican Ser- 
mons, or for one who believes them to 
contain the whole truth about God and 
man, except ultimately to do what New- 
man did, abandon his own inherent right 
as a man to think, shrink from the splendid 
perils of responsibility, and thus fall a victim 
to the fascination of a church which makes 
the prostration of the reason the first con- 
dition of communion with her, and her un- 
relenting terms of peace. 

172 



yohn Henry Newman 

In all the quotations which we may 
subsequently make from Newman, you 
will feel that the real effect is always as I have 
said — to baffle you, to lead you to suspect 
yourself, to make you timid and uneasy, 
contemptible in your own eyes and ready 
to surrender. You will feel that whatever 
power his words and ideas may have, rests 
upon a certain element of terror in the hu- 
man soul which, even according to our faith, 
is not the earliest or the deepest faculty in 
man, but something which invaded man and 
remains for ever opposed to God's idea 
of man. 

Granted that this terror — which let me 
say, by the way, might be aroused and let 
loose within us to a pitch that would have 
more than served Newman's purpose, I 
mean even to the point of madness — 
granted that this terror is a true faculty of 
the human soul, it is not the only faculty, 
nor is it at all the faculty by which man 
has come into his spiritual inheritance thus 
far. The love of life is as deep as the fear of 

*73 



yohn Henry Newman 

life — nay, it must be deeper. The pro- 
found sense which has its roots below 
consciousness, and appears most sweetly 
in little children, whom Christ instanced — 
the profound sense that it is a friendly 
world into which we have come, and that 
life is an opportunity rather than a risk — 
it is that wholesome instinct, purified in- 
deed by fear, confirmed by faith, on which 
man has come thus far. And, to close this 
portion of our survey, on which we may 
have dealt disproportionately, Clough's 
triumphant line stands: "If hopes were 
dupes, fears may be liars.' ' If we are 
wrong in our hopes we may be wrong in 
our fears, for both reside indestructibly 
within the human heart, and Christ came 
into the world to put an end to man's an- 
cient timidity and misgiving. In the bal- 
ance of man's hopes and fears Christ 
entered the scale of man's hopes. Let not 
your heart be agitated (the very trembling 
of a balance is indicated), believe in God, 
in Me, in the future ! 

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John Henry Newman 

Whilst it is true that Newman avoids 
all excess or exuberance in his language, 
and compels himself at all times to say less 
ihan he might have said, he had neverthe- 
less a most dramatic and impressive way 
of delivering his message. For example, 
do you know anything more startling than 
this sentence from his "Apologia " — (a sen- 
tence which, in the judgment of the late 
Bishop Westcott, shares with another in 
Browning's " Muleykeh " the rank of being 
the most pregnant line in the whole range 
of literature)? Newman is speaking of his 
own private belief in God and of the poor 
and shifty ground on which it rests apart 
from the authority of some external and 
abiding institution, and here is how he de- 
livers himself: — 

4 'Starting then with the being of a 
God (which, as I have said, is as certain 
to me as the certainty of my own existence, 
though when I try to put the grounds of 
that certainty into logical shape I find a 
difficulty in doing so in mood and in figure 

175 



yohn Henry Newman 

to my satisfaction), I look out of myself 
into the world of men, and there I see a 
sight which fills me with unspeakable dis- 
tress. The world seems simply to give the 
lie to that great truth of which my whole be- 
ing is so full, and the effect upon me is in 
consequence, as a matter of necessity, as 
confusing as if it denied that I am in exist- 
ence myself." Here follows the sentence 
which I wish you to note. " If I looked into 

A MIRROR AND DID NOT SEE MY FACE, I should 

have the sort of feeling which actually 
comes upon me when I look into this liv- 
ing world and see no reflection of its 
Creator." He then proceeds to show how 
the Roman Church is the witness and sup- 
port of his belief, but gives reasons which 
have no force for those of us who, to say 
no more, hold that the real knowledge of 
God is always by faith, not by sight, and 
is, strictly speaking, personal and incom- 
municable, the gift of God Himself. " Hope 
that is seen is not hope, for what a man seeth 
why doth he yet hope for ? But if we hope 

176 



yohn Henry Newman 

for that which we see not, then do we with 
patience wait for it ; and the Spirit also 
maketh intercession for us with groanings 
which cannot be uttered/' And again : 
" Faith is the substance of things hoped 
for, the evidence of things not seen." 

But those words, with their swift hor- 
ror, with their touch, as one might say, of 
madness — "if I looked into a mirror and 
did not see my face" — may serve as an 
example of Newman's tremendous power 
with words ; they may serve at the same 
time as an illustration of the kind of as- 
sault which his preaching makes upon his 
readers. He looks into the human heart 
and sees no sign of God. He looks across 
the fields of secular history or into the laws 
and processes of the natural world, and he 
finds no steadfast ground of faith. One 
by one he puts out the kindly lights — the 
little genialities and courtesies which even 
the uncouth world permits itself to show 
us. He awakens misgivings, he raises 
doubts where, as you imagined, everything 

*77 



yohn Henry Newman 

was well secured. He will not suffer you 
to rest your faith, or take encouragement 
for faith, in anything within your own 
moral or emotional experience, in any feel- 
ing or mood or purpose, however gener- 
ous and unworldly it may seem to you. 
And then, though, to speak fairly of New- 
man, he did not for many years see that 
this was inevitable — then, when you are 
crying for something to believe in, for 
something apart from your own glancing 
and unsteadfast moods, which have now be- 
come suspect ; for something that will end 
the strife of doubt and misery ; as you pic- 
ture yourself alone in the midst of your 
awful surroundings in this world and in the 
world to come — you are ready to hear of 
an Infallible Church which will release you 
from thinking, and are ready, not in faith, 
but in despair, to cast yourself into her 
arms. 

\His most powerful passages are just 
those in which he is demonstrating how 
helpless we are even by the help of God 

178' 



yohn Henry Newman 

(as it would seem) to think out our way in 
this world; how difficult, how mysterious 
our human lot is, how hazardous therefore 
to risk ourselves upon the support of any 
mere feeling, however warm, which in a 
moment has grown cold. And it is all 
true, if it means that we need to have a per- 
fect confidence in God, and to believe that 
our security in this world and throughout 
eternity depends not upon our poor and 
fitful holds on God, but upon His Almighty 
hold on us. But that is not at all what 
Newman means. In these passages and 
throughout his teaching there is a scarcely 
veiled contempt for man as he is — for his 
efforts and enterprises, for his confidence 
in his own reason and endowments. Even 
where it is not his set purpose to dishearten 
a man, to poison the wells for him, taking 
away his self-respect, that is in nearly every 
case the effect of Newman's preaching. 
As we listen, the feeling creeps over us 
like a cold hand that it is almost an imper- 
tinence for us to think for ourselves, or to 

179 



yohn Henry Newman 

rely upon any instinct of our own ; that we 
are in a hopeless case ; that the best thing 
that could happen to us would be for some 
strong Company (so to speak) to take 
over our miserable private business. 

I believe it is quite just to Newman to 
say that though there are shades and de- 
grees, and though different people will feel 
what he says in different ways, this is al- 
ways the kind of effect which his message 
leaves. You are crushed. You are over- 
whelmed. It may be, you are mocked. 
He undermines your self-respect, and thus 
leaves you either agnostic or superstitious. 
Henceforth, you are ready to believe noth- 
ing, or you are prepared to believe any- 
thing. But he takes all effort from you, 
all desire to help yourself. You weep, it 
may be. Yes, once or twice, Newman 
might even lead us to shed tears. But 
they are not our best tears. They are 
blinding tears, not the tears God some- 
times gives us, through which we see 
shining gates in front. No; you weep, 

1 80 



John Henry Newman 

not for your sin, but simply because you 
are thinking what a blunder everything is, 
and that there is no way out of the en- 
tanglement except by a sacrifice of a kind 
that, as you somehow feel, a loving God 
need not have asked of you. 

And now, let us review some of the 
salient points in Newman's public career 
and in the history of his religious opinions. 

The question is often asked, how was 
it possible for a man of Newman's strength 
to take the journey which he took and to 
end where he ended. The best answer, I 
think, is to say that Newman was born a 
Roman Catholic. I mean, that according 
to his own story, from the time when he 
first formed ideas for himself, he showed a 
tendency towards that prostration of his 
reason before authority, an inability to en- 
dure suspense, which were sure in all his 
circumstances to lead him, where as a mat- 
ter of history, they did lead him. He him- 
self tells us that when he was quite a boy, 

181 



yohn Henry Newman 

about ten years of age, he had a verse 
book in which, at the heading of the page, 
he drew as it were instinctively a solid 
cross. He was always superstitious. On 
entering into a dark passage or room, he 
invariably made the sign of the cross. 
This happened long before he adopted 
Roman opinions. It seems to have been 
with him a matter of temperament or in- 
stinct. In his youth he read the books 
which were written to controvert the Chris- 
tian faith. These, however, made no im- 
pression upon him. This may have been 
so, because he had answers for the sceptics ; 
but more probably it was due to his inborn 
habit of believing. He never passed through 
a period of real and fundamental doubt. 
He knew the difficulties that men were 
raising with regard to faith, the questions 
which were being asked ; but I doubt whether 
he ever felt the direct challenge of them. 
He had made up his mind. By the time 
he was sixteen he had already resolved to 
enter the Church. In due course he went 

182 



yohn Henry Newman 

to Oxford. There were some notable stu- 
dents in his time. Gladstone was there. 
Whateley, John Keble, Pusey, Williams, 
Marriott, and, — Hurrell Froude, who 
really awakened Newman and set him his 
course. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, had just 
left. Jowett, Temple, the writers of the 
Essays and Reviews, were coming or had 
come. It was a stirring time, both in pol- 
itics and religion. There were rumblings 
which might signify anything. There were 
shrewd minds in those days, who expected 
nothing- less than the disestablishment of 
the Church, and who saw in the distress of 
the time and in the sullenness of popular 
opinion, the spectre of an immense, and it 
might be, a bloody revolution. For one 
thing, it was still the days of the Corn 
Laws ; and for another thing, Queen Vic- 
toria, that good woman had not yet come 
to the throne. The year 1832 was ap- 
proaching. Reform was in the air. The 
Bill for the Emancipation of Catholics was 
before Parliament. It was characteristic of 

183 



yohn Henry Newman 

Newman and his friends that they opposed 
that Bill. I say, it was characteristic of one 
who, I believe, never shrank from saying 
openly that truth, the Kingdom of God, 
had to be defended from heretics and 
schismatics, if need be, by the power of 
the civil arm, by persecution and disabilities. 

In his opposition to Catholic Emanci- 
pation, Newman manifested that hatred of 
all that we call progress which was in- 
stinctive with him and explains everything. 

And it was not only in the sphere of 
politics, but in the sphere of religion itself, 
that the spirit of inquiry and readjustment 
was abroad. New opinions were begin- 
ning to be held as to the authority of the 
Scriptures. Science, in our modern sense, 
had begun to assail and to undermine all 
established opinions on the facts of nature, 
and on the genesis of man. It seemed to 
Newman that the ark of the Lord was in 
danger. He did not for a moment con- 
sider whether the time into which he had 
been born might not be one of those times 

184 



yohn Henry Newman 

which need to come, when the human mind 
is called upon to rid itself of encumbrances, 
for which it has no urgent need, in order 
that it may acquire new treasures, and new 
confirmations for its faith in the new coun- 
try to which all things are inviting it. New- 
man, and those who were with him, were 
genuinely afraid that in sweeping the house 
for the lost treasure, men might sweep out 
the treasure itself; or to vary the metaphor, 
and to quote our most ingenious and 
spirited apologist, they were afraid that in 
emptying out the bath, men might empty 
out the baby too. 

But here as elsewhere, Newman was 
guided not so much by reasons as by the 
whole bias of his nature. All change was 
hateful to him. He suspected research 
and was never weary of showing how in- 
adequate all men's words are to deal with 
those mysteries and elusive facts which 
they presume to describe. To him, faith 
was above everything else, obedience to 
authority, the unconditional, and if need be, 

185 



yohn Henry Newman 

the abject surrender of the human reason 
to the doctrines of the Church. It was about 
this time, that he conceived a hatred towards 
the work of Luther and the Reformers. 
He often declared that "the spirit of lawless- 
ness came in with the Reformation, and 
liberalism is its offspring." He confessed 
that he had a horror of the principle of 
private judgment. In short, Newman 
was always on his way to Rome, though 
he was not always aware of it. 

The position which Newman occupied 
could not long withstand the gnawing as- 
saults of his own restless logic. He held 
that the doctrines of the Christian religion 
— and in his teaching it is always these, 
and not spiritual obedience which are the 
objects of faith — had been delivered to the 
Church. The Anglican Church having, as 
he thought at this time, an unbroken de- 
scent from the Apostolic age, held the true 
tradition. To believe was to accept that 
tradition. He saw that an Infallible Bible 
needed an Infallible Interpreter. If every 

186 



yohn Henry Newman 

man had the right to make his own inter- 
pretation, where, then, would be the guar- 
antee for unity and for truth? That being 
his position, Newman soon found himself 
in difficulties. In reading the Fathers, 
doubts began to arise in his mind whether 
his own Church, and not the Roman Church, 
was the true home of authority. Each 
Church made the claim, yet their testi- 
monies conflicted. But history showed 
him that the Roman Church was more prim- 
itive, and the doubt arose whether the An- 
glican Church were really Apostolic. 

He began to study the constitution of 
his Church and that study confirmed his 
uneasiness. He saw that Queen Elizabeth, 
in establishing a form of religion in Eng- 
land, was anxious to bring all the religious 
parties within the realm into harmony. 
The Church must be Protestant, but, at 
the same time, the old Catholic priests 
must be made welcome to its communion. 
And so the thirty-nine articles were drawn 
up, with sufficient indefiniteness to permit 

187 



yohn Henry Newman 

men who held divergent and even contrary 
views accepting them, or some of them. 
As Newman realized all this, his misgiv- 
ings deepened into a conviction that the 
Church of England was not the true Cath- 
olic Church. He saw that the Church of 
England herself was in doubt about those 
very things which were troubling him. 
There was no decision in her voice. 

He looked across to Rome. For New- 
man to look across was ultimately to go 
across, for he could never endure the tor- 
ment of a divided or hesitating mind. 

It was for him a time of very deep dis- 
tress, and he resolved to go abroad for 
rest and change. In company with Hur- 
rell Froude, he travelled in Italy and Sicily. 
Even then he did not realize that he was 
drifting into the Church of Rome, although 
it must have been evident to any one who 
was allowed to share his thoughts at that 
time. His letters from the Continent are 
full of the Catholic services in which he is 
joining. The Roman Church fascinates 

1 88 



John Henry Newman 

him by its very bulk, by its unquestioning 
and unruffled acceptance of things as they 
happen to have come down through the 
ages. It is a curious and, to myself, a sad 
spectacle to see any man who has " begun 
in the Spirit thinking that he will be made 
perfect by the flesh," to see this man blind 
to all the ignorance, to the slavishness, to 
the mental deadness, to the superstition, 
which were then rampant in Italy and 
Sicily — things for which the Roman Church 
was largely responsible, and for which she 
ought to have held herself responsible — to 
see this man blind to all that, or again ex- 
cusing it all, even praising it, because, at 
any rate, in those same regions there was 
no revolt of the human intelligence against 
the tyranny of tradition. It is to me a 
tragical point to which a man has reached, 
when, rather than that men should apply 
their minds to the facts of life and of the 
soul, and find reasons, if they need 
reasons, for the faith that is in them, he 
would have them sink, as far as men may, 

189 



yohn Henry Newman 

to the intellectual imbecility and quietness 
of sheep that merely graze, and breed, and 
die! For, "how much better is a man 
than a sheep I" 

In Sicily severe illness overtook New- 
man. It was after his recovery, and while 
he was on the voyage from Palermo to 
Marseilles, that the beautiful hymn, " Lead, 
kindly Light," was written. It came to 
him as they lay becalmed for a whole night 
in the straits of Bonifacio. He felt that, 
like his ship, he too was drifting, and he 
hardly dared yet think what port was likely 
to receive him. Speaking for myself, the 
the man who wrote "Lead, kindly Light,' ' 
was nearer, even as he wrote, to the true 
spirit of faith than the same man in later 
years, when he had, by a definite, and, for 
him, irrevocable act of self-abandonment, 
sold his high, even if perilous, birth-right. 

The captain of that orange boat which 
bore Newman to Marseilles was in his own 
sphere, living by the simple faith which 
alone God requires of men. He was put- 

190 



John Henry Newman 

ting out to sea, and the only assurance 
which he had that he would ever reach the 
coast of France was that his ship had the 
power to float, that others had set out and 
had arrived, that his compass was true, or, if 
that failed, that the stars would keep their 
places and would shine. 

Newman returned to Oxford, and con- 
tinued to preach for some years in St. 
Mary's. It was earnest, searching, sad 
work, with never a touch of the joy of the 
Lord. " His sermons during those years 
appeared to be the outcome of continued 
meditation upon his fellow-creatures and 
their position in the world, their awful re- 
sponsibilities, the mystery of their nature. 
A tone, partly of fear, partly of infinite 
pity, runs through them all. Men are met 
on all sides with difficulties. Life seemed 
to be not the proof, but the contradiction 
of Christ's Gospel. And in the back- 
ground, unexpressed, but forming itself 
into words, was the unconscious hint that 
in some visible community there must lie 

i 9 i 



John Henry Newman 

the secret, in some society must be man's 
sole resting-place." They contain ''ex- 
quisite passages, speaking the language of 
the world, yet most unworldly, displaying 
a subtie knowledge of human nature" — a 
priest's knowledge, I was going to say — 
"its twistings and weaknesses and self-de- 
ceptions : recognizing with an awe that ap- 
proaches to dread the impenetrable mys- 
teries of the stupendous darkness in which 
man for a moment emerges to play his 
little part and vanish : well fitted to leave a 
strong impression upon the callous worldli- 
ness of men, and penetrating painfully to 
the very heart of the anxious and incon- 
sistent Christian." But there is no inner 
freedom in them, no Gospel, no good news, 
no news at all ; only the reiteration of that 
natural despair, that terror of the law, 
that awful sense of forlornness, which 
would indeed still weigh us down to death 
if Jesus Christ were struck out of our 
hearts. 

But he was an unhappy man who 
192 



yohn Henry Newman 

preached those eight volumes of Parochial 
and Plain Sermons. 

In 1 84 1 Newman resigned his position 
at St. Mary's, and retired to Littlemore, a 
village three miles from Oxford. The end 
was near. In regard to the Anglican 
Church, he was already, as he describes it, 
"on his death-bed." In 1843 ne was re- 
ceived into the Church of Rome. He 
underwent a short probation ; visited the 
Pope ; was placed at the Oratory in Bir- 
mingham ; became a cardinal. He died on 
the evening of the nth of August, 1890. 
He tells us that he experienced little 
change on entering the Church of Rome. 
He says that all his doubts were resolved, 
but from his own account we should rather 
say that he had given up his very right to 
have doubts, to weigh and choose at least 
"with all his strength," and "with all his 
mind," as we are commanded. In short he 
had given up his right to hold a personal 
belief. 

In drawing these notes and this com- 

13 193 



yohn Henry Newman 

mentary to a conclusion, I wish very hum- 
bly, as becomes me, but quite resolutely, 
as also becomes me, to offer three short 
criticisms of Newman's life-long principles. 
They are criticisms which I must try your 
patience only so far as to indicate, asking 
you, however, to believe that they rest 
upon well considered reasons. I said New- 
man's life-long principles ; for, as we have 
seen, his entrance into the Church of Rome 
produced no real change in his mental at- 
titude. That step was for such a man in- 
evitable, sooner or later. It was the nat- 
ural result of a habit of mind which New- 
man never did anything to correct or 
restrain, and concerning which he never 
raised the question whether, in the light of 
history, it was not a habit of mind which 
had been responsible for some of the 
darkest and most ghastly pages in the an- 
nals of the race. 

i. In the first place, it would be an 
easy matter to show that the thorough 
denial of the right of private judgment in 

194 



John Henry Newman 

matters of faith would put an end to faith, 
and thus work its own refutation. 

Every doctrine of the Church, as stated 
in her formularies, was, at the outset, the 
result of long and at times very bitter con- 
troversy. Every doctrinal statement, that 
is to say, was the result of an accumula- 
tion of private judgments which, at a cer- 
tain point, became so harmonious, so rep- 
resentative of the dominant opinion of that 
particular age, that the Church of that age 
gave its sanction and authority to the 
statement. 

And besides that : to accept a doctrine, 
to assent to it, implies, if the acceptance is 
to have any value, an active use of one's 
mind, a certain deliberateness and choosing. 
A man's beliefs ought not, surely, to be 
things which are fixed upon him, so to 
speak ; things which he must not even 
read too interestedly, lest he should begin 
to think about them, and thus involuntarily 
deviate into pronouncing secret judgments 
upon them. Surely, if a man's belief is 

195 



yohn Henry Newman 

to retain any moral worth, or to signify 
anything for the man himself, or as a testi- 
mony to the world, it must have the cor- 
roboration of his mind, the assent and ap- 
proval and joyful support of his whole 
manhood. 

Once more : while Newman denies the 
right of private judgment to decide in 
matters of faith, he himself was led by his 
own reason, by the restless exercise of all 
his faculties, by his own private and lonely 
sense of what for him was right and neces- 
sary, into the Church of Rome. 

Newman's " Apologia" is nothing at 
all if it is not a defence of the right of the 
individual to judge upon matters of faith. 
His private judgment led him into Rome: 
another's private judgment, having weighed 
his reasons, may keep him out of Rome. 

There is no need to doubt that once a 
man has made up his mind that, so to put 
it, he has no mind worth making up, once 
a man has made up his mind that he cannot 
think with safety, that there is an incurable 

196 



yohn Henry Newman 

vice or fault in his thinking apparatus, 
whenever he brings it to bear upon re- 
ligion ; once that point has been reached, 
he will have no further mental anguish, as 
Newman claims that he had none after he 
took his step. Of course not. A man, let 
us say, has a limb which gives him great 
pain at times, and continual uneasiness. 
He drags it about with him and in conse- 
quence spends miserable days. At length 
he has the limb amputated. From that 
moment, though many are never the same 
after such a shock, (from that moment) he 
has not a single twinge in the limb which 
has been taken off. Certainly not : but he 
is less of a man by that limb. And so, 
from the day in which he finally withdrew 
from his reason, the right to think in any 
decisive way upon the doctrinal state- 
ments and traditional claims of his Church, 
from that moment he seems able to accept 
things or helpless to reject them, which, in 
other days he would have instinctively re- 
fused. Faith, having lost the curb of 

197 



John Henry Newman 

reason, may appear at any moment as the 
most childish credulity. Thus we find 
Newman in his later and Catholic writings 
seriously defending miracles which are 
merely grotesque, believing in the virtue of 
sacred oils, and rags and pieces of wood, 
maintaining with his matchless literary 
style, stories which many an equally devout 
person would prefer not to believe. Be- 
cause the doctrine of the Roman Church 
declares that the sun moves round the 
earth, Newman will not say plainly that 
there the Church was wrong, and is wrong. 
Though even young children know that 
relatively to the earth the sun stands still, 
and that it is the earth which goes round 
the sun, Newman will only ask with a sub- 
tlety and disingenuousness which should 
be a warning, " How can I say which of 
the two moves until I know what motion 
is?" 

2. My second general remark, by way 
of criticism of Newman's career and its 
conclusion, is to notice as characteristic of 

198 



yohn Henry Newman 

him, his attitude of suspicion and hostility 
towards the movements which were pecul- 
iar to his time, movements which will be 
celebrated in history, not as deeds of dark- 
ness, but as eminent signs of the spirit and 
energy of God. 

In all this suspicion and hostility New- 
man surely showed a lamentable want of con- 
fidence in God, a lamentable forgetting of 
the saying which he tells us affected him so 
profoundly, though in a very pretty way 
by comparison with this other — securus 
judicat orbis terrarum — which to a believ- 
ing man simply means " God rules." 

I Newman saw nothing hopeful, no ground 
for thanksgiving, in all the mental enter- 
prise of the Victorian age. To him it was 
all tainted with the denial of God, and there- 
fore only mischievous. He never, so far 
as I can recall, gave God praise for the 
rise of hospitals, infirmaries, asylums, for 
the abolition of slavery, for the improve- 
ment in the circumstances in prison life, 
for the betterment of the general condition 

199 



yohn Henry Newman 

of the people, or for the marvelous spread 
of the Gospel and the name of Christ in 
heathen lands. And yet these, it may be, 
as they are signs, many of them, of a 
growing sensitiveness towards our fellow- 
men, a growing sense of our mutual re- 
sponsibility, may have been the cathedrals 
which the century was raising, witnesses 
and monuments of the soul in man, and 
thus to the glory of God. This was in no 
way Newman's view. In his eyes the in- 
tellectual movement of the time was but 
the outbreak of man's sinful pride, and as 
often as he encountered it, he showed his 
teeth, as though his bone were threatened. 
To him it was all little better than the re- 
bellious building of another Tower of 
Babel, and it could only end in a confusion 
of tongues X 

3. My last general remark is this: 
There was another alternative which always 
lay open to him, offering a solution of the 
difficulty into which his own embarrassing 
premises had led him. 

200 



yohn Henry Newman 

He believed that Christ had founded a 
Church on earth. Good ! In the Anglican 
Church he confessed that certain notes of 
authority were wanting. The same was 
true of the Greek, the same of the Roman. 
But considering these things, that no his- 
torical Church corresponded even in es- 
sential signs to the perfect ideal of the 
Church of Christ, manifesting God as inev- 
itably as the sun radiates light, might he 
not have been led to that conclusion which 
at once puts all our human enterprises into 
their humble place and yet mocks none of 
them, but leaves us looking hopefully 
towards God, — the conclusion to which the 
apostle came, who, in his day, had the care 
of all the Churches, the conclusion, namely, 
that we all of us "have the treasure in 
earthen vessels, that the excellency of the 
power may be of God, and not of our- 
selves ?" Making, as we must ever make, 
the deduction due to our human weakness, 
surely it was open to him to see the true 
Church wherever the mind of Jesus Christ 

201 



yohn Henry Newman 

was seeking to find expression and a home! 
True it is that we are far from having yet 
apprehended that for which Christ appre- 
hended us. Nevertheless, today every- 
where Christ is preached, and therein with 
a greater he might well have rejoiced. It 
is the task of all the ages, and not of one age 
only to bring on perfection, when Christ 
shall be all in all, when " there shall be no 
Temple therein for the Lord God Almighty 
and the Lamb are the Temple of it." 

Was it not always open to him to break 
away from the purely worldly and physical 
and apparent as tests and signs of God's 
Presence, and to take up that truly Catholic 
outlook upon this immense human scene, 
acknowledging in every holy undertaking, 
in every advance of the mind of Christ 
upon the minds of men, in every soul 
whom Christ inhabits, in every community 
which bears evidences of the Holy Spirit — 
acknowledging in these the first-fruits of 
the coming harvest, the first and in this 
hour of time the invincible, rays of that 

202 



yohn Henry Newman 

Eternal light which is coming and coming 
through all ages, until Christ shall be all 
in all ? 

Why, since he could not see all the 
notes of the perfect Church in any one 
existing Church — antiquity, authority, sanc- 
tity, and the rest, did not Newman, like 
faithful Abraham, still look for the city 
which hath the foundations, whose builder 
and maker is God ? Why did he not aban- 
don that premiss which tormented and en- 
tangled him through all his journey, a 
premiss which was always false, and in 
contradiction to God's way everywhere, 
the premiss and first requirement, namely, 
that the true and only Church must of 
necessity be one in a visible and material 
sense: why did he not rise above that 
lower level of judging men and institutions, 
and declare with that greater preacher of 
Christ, who received his message by Rev- 
elation of the exalted Lord : * 'Jerusalem 
which is above is free, which is the Mother 
of us all?" 

203 



FURTHER THOUGHTS 

FROM MY NOTE-BOOK ON "NEWMAN" 

My fear of unmitigated "Science" is that it 
will drive men into superstition. 

"We were made and meant for and must have 
God." 



- 



The truth underlying Newman's " Pilgrim's 
Progress ' ' is the justice of his appeal to history, to 
life considered broadly. For it is the fact that man 
has faced his tasks, has endured immeasurable pains, 
and the long monotony of his existence, by the help 
of his beliefs, because he has kept a window open 
to what to him at each stage was the Eternal. New- 
man was right in feeling, as he did, that knowledge 
by itself leads to death, and in protesting against the 
tyranny of one faculty of the soul, viz. , intellectual 
reason, in the name of man's total nature. But he 
failed to indicate the true place which the reason 
has in matters of faith.^ 

A truth (the converse truth) underlies Huxley's 
phrase, "the sin of faith," the sin of credulity. 

We must be prepared to reject that which is con- 
tradictory to the laws of our mind ; yet on the other 

205 



Notes on "Newman" 

side, we must never forget that all the great human 
enterprises — patriotism, marriage, fidelity to kindred, 
martyrdom, are all works of faith — have been ac- 
complished and are still pursued, not in obedience to 
reason, but in obedience to mysterious impulses, to 
some divine enthusiasm with which the Creator loaded 
man at the beginning and still replenishes him, in 
obedience to an instinct which is blind to conse- 
quences, seeing clearly only the immediate thing. 

Compare Balfour's dominant idea in his philo- 
sophical writings, that all great movements have 
been "irrational." 

Perhaps Newman in his search for certainty was 
seeking something which God has not ordained for 
men. 

I verily believe that if we were perfectly sure of 
God, so that we could say "There He is," "There 
His will is absolutely, and without the very possibility 
of mistake to be known, ' ' I believe that it would 
destroy all moral initiative, and would alter the very 
nature of the soul. 

"That were the seeing God, no flesh shall dare." 

If the entire world without exception believed 
that the Pope was God's actual plenipotentiary and 
representative in the world, really believed that as 
we believe that fire burns, it would bring thought 
and religion itself to an end. Cf. Robert Buchanan's 

206 



Notes on "Newman" 

poem "The Eye," or that passage in Browning's 
"The Ring and the Book, "containing the lines: 

" What, but the weakness in a faith supplies 
The incentive to humanity ?" 

And then, as Professor James puts it, saying what 
it was high time somebody had said, "There is that 
within us which is prepared to take a risk. ' ' 

* 'A religion which is not a certainty is a mockery 
and a horror" (Carlyle). 

A This is the truth underlying Newman's dialectic, 
an's innermost need is for rest, for bondage. 
But surely this must be spiritual. When the object 
of faith is something visible, then it is no longer 
faith, but sight, and inferior. Faith is of the un- 
seen, but morally inevitable. Faith says "it must be 
so. ' ' Its intellectual basis is that in our best hours 
we are not deceived, that our minds are in harmony 
with God, that He has not made man in vain. 

May not the incarnation of God in Christ have 
as its profoundest interpretation tms : that in Jesus 
Christ we have God's sanction and corroboration of 
our holiest human hopes and dreams ? 

"If it were not so, I would have told you," 
said Jesus. 

From this point of view, Hugo of St. Victor's 
great saying is but a passionate plea that life is ulti- 
mately reasonable, that God is just : Domine si error 
est \ a Te decepti sumus / 

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